Bringing workloads to the cloud means IT solution providers bridging the gap between expectations and reality, says Manu Mehra, Managing Director – ANZ, Lenovo ISG.
Every tech-first business requires a cloud strategy to enhance flexibility and efficiency at a reduced cost. As the IT landscape continues to evolve rapidly, CIOs are looking to lay the foundation and enable emerging technologies through cloud technology’s agility in processing data.
A study from MIT Technology Review ranked Australia and New Zealand second and third in APAC respectively as leaders in the adoption of cloud infrastructure, tools and applications to accelerate and transform economic productivity.
After over a decade of cloud transformation, IT decision makers are facing a new challenge – establishing a robust and scalable cloud infrastructure strategy.
The cloud powering intelligent transformation
The benefits of the cloud are clear in Digital Transformation. During the emergence of cloud, many organizations adopted it to benefit from virtualization and reduced CAPEX. Today, accelerated Digital Transformation has increased workloads and the big missing piece is cloud agility.
Organizational workloads have become more complex due to the increase in data and CIOs are evaluating going back to native for containerization. What also intimidates CIOs is the speed at which IT modernization is taking place as emerging technologies are charting a path to an unknown IT environment. For instance, over a decade ago, solution providers were consulting businesses on challenges within the infrastructure stack. Fast-forward 15 years to today, solution providers are helping businesses solve challenges arising from workloads.
Precision in the cloud
Managing workload complexities and finding agility requires IT decision makers to have a definite cloud strategy – and they are turning to IT solution providers to help bridge the gap between cloud expectations and reality. Organizations should redefine their company goals and outline their strategies, budgets and add-on requirements.
When it comes to bringing workloads to the cloud, they should also evaluate services that are ‘good-to-have’ versus ‘must-have’. The critical next step is to establish a framework, followed by alternatives to manage multiple cloud workloads in the IT environment.
Looking ahead
A hybrid cloud is an optimum solution for organizations looking to leverage multiple cloud environment workloads. It helps to seamlessly orchestrate a path to the cloud from server to software. Tech providers are readily available to provide ample support from design to finish line, enabling organizations to better assess their infrastructure, identify challenges and deploy the right solutions.
As the industry looks at the next decade of cloud transformation, the infrastructure needs to be agile and flexible enough to meet changing requirements. CIOs can look at enabling faster-to-market deployment by using preconfigured solutions which are thoroughly tested and equipped with industry-leading software.
By leveraging As-a-Service offerings, businesses can access smarter infrastructure based on actual requirements and pay only for what they use without any lock-in. Pay-as-you-go consumption-based models benefit organizations with increased flexibility and security, infrastructure simplicity, time to value, global scalability, legacy workloads, data ownership and cost control by combining cloud and on-premise solutions.
