As an increasing number of organisations become more ambitious with their cloud migration strategies, Sonja Weber, Lead Delivery Solution Manager at T-Systems South Africa, says that ICT outsourcing is certainly not dead, although technology players are being forced to add value in new ways.
While hyperscale cloud OEMs provide many of the essential infrastructure and services that an organisation needs, local technology partners play a crucial role in guiding clients on everything from governance, compliance, security and the management of costs.
The accessibility of public cloud environments certainly creates phenomenal opportunities for digital transformation, but (if migration is not managed incorrectly) can also open up a number of risks and significantly inflate costs.
Consider for example dozens of different departments or business areas procuring licenses, services and capacity from cloud platforms, creating new company profiles and using various credit cards to buy these services.
It’s an administrative nightmare for CIOs as they scramble to control the various cloud services that a business has purchased to understand potential security vulnerabilities and get a grip on just how much is being spent. The problem often described as ‘shadow IT’ has become a huge, ugly monster in the cloud era.
‘Wild West’ scenario
In the worst cases, this fragmentation of a firm’s cloud services creates a wide range of problems, including:
- Information security risks
- Inflated costs
- Governance concerns and audit failures
- Regulatory and compliance breaches
- Loss of control and co-ordination of digitisation strategy
- Business downtime and risks due to lack of support and business continuity plans
- Reputational damage – if services are insecure or unavailable
To help deal with this issue of reckless, ungoverned and fragmented cloud subscriptions, the modern ICT outsourcer must evolve its role. It’s no longer a case of merely articulating the benefits of cloud platforms and tactically helping to migrate applications, but rather about designing strategies – helping the client to manage, simplify and extract maximum business benefits from the cloud.
Progressive outsourcing players are pivoting towards providing these kinds of executive consulting services that guide the organisation’s cloud strategy, in the context of the overall business vision.
This is especially relevant when we consider that many large firms are operating multiple cloud environments, each one appropriate for different needs. The outsourcer should be orchestrating all of these clouds, aligning each environment with a high-level strategy.
New areas of focus
There are a number of other ways that ICT outsourcers should be evolving, to help their clients capture the greatest cloud advantages.
Perhaps the most important of these is applying firm rigour and discipline to compliance matters – ensuring continued compliance with new incoming legislation like GDPR and POPI, addressing any data sovereignty issues and anonymising and protecting sensitive data in the most secure manner.
With deep sector-specific knowledge, ICT outsourcers will be able to confidently guide and implement cloud strategies that give clients strong levels of assurance and then remain closely involved to ensure continued compliance in the future.
Unfortunately, too often an organisation will wait for a negative audit finding before truly addressing governance, risk and compliance requirements.
By bringing established discipline to the cloud strategy, ICT partners cannot only guide their clients on what to migrate (and when), but also help them to mature and re-engineer their business processes for the cloud era. They’ll be able to provide guidance on when additional bandwidth and other infrastructure is needed, when additional systems and controls should be added to secure one’s data, for instance.
With every organisation having unique needs and walking its own, unique cloud journey, it’s also important for outsourcers to play an active role in co-developing new services with cloud providers, all within the ambit of clear standards and certifications.
It’s worth noting the root cause of Shadow IT, of ungoverned Cloud subscriptions across the organisation. Generally, this is driven by a sense of urgency – as business heads want to quickly rush services to market, worried they will start lagging behind their peers.
Without some form of central co-ordination, this can pose huge risks. The onus is on CIOs and their technology partners to create compelling cloud strategies that address (with speed and agility) the needs of all business stakeholders.
It’s time for local outsourcers to step-up and evolve from being a simple supplier or broker of services, towards a digital partner that truly understands their client’s business and brings a depth of experience to the table.
