Cloud is playing an important role during the working changes surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. Mohammad Bin Sulaiman, CEO of Moro Hub, explains how using the cloud is fundamental to being able to scale operations as an organisation’s workforce gets distributed remotely.
With the impact of COVID-19 severely affecting regional businesses in the month of March, CIOs have begun rapidly accelerating their Digital Transformation initiatives. This is especially so for CIOs in the market segments of banking and finance, oil and gas, retail, healthcare and education.
CIOs regard increased migration to cloud as part of their Digital Transformation, driving scalability, agility, cost control and manageability. These are critical factors supporting an organisation’s survivability as the impact of COVID-19 drives enormous stress across the business fabric of an organisation.
In these challenging times, being able to scale operations as an organisation’s workforce gets distributed remotely, using cloud as a platform for business and IT applications, is fundamental. Another critical initiative being undertaken by META CIOs to combat the impact of COVID-19 is to manage costs more effectively by leveraging the XaaS (Anything-as-a-Service) OPEX cloud model available through pay-as-you-go options of usage.
Notwithstanding the urgency initiated by COVID-19, as organisations increasingly migrate to cloud and multi-cloud platforms, as the fastest growing segment of IT platforms, there is growing responsibility for CIOs to manage these costs. Budgets need to be planned and invested in carefully, keeping in mind that when all the eggs are in one basket, the impact of anything going wrong or unmanaged cost overheads, the impact is often multifold and accelerated.
On the flip side, having a multi-cloud strategy in place helps to avoid any type of cloud vendor lock in and adds a degree of price independence.
A typical rapid move approach to forklift and shift legacy and on-premises applications to the cloud is sometimes fraught with medium term challenges. Such legacy applications when deployed in the cloud are not true cloud applications. When adopting any fork lift approach it is wise to consider the business drivers as the principal factors for working out the basis for a return on investment.
Another important development is the proliferation of ATM-like cloud availability, also called distributed cloud availability. Cloud service providers are developing edge and pop up services. Cloud edge services are the creation of micro data centres, to take care of pockets of high consumption that are especially sensitive to requirements of low latency. Pop up cloud centres are temporary data centres meant to take care of temporary scaling of demand due to local events such as mega spectator events.
However, one of the biggest challenges is the lack of skilled resources to support XaaS type of cloud migration projects. As an example, insufficient cloud IaaS skills are likely to delay half of enterprise IT organisations’ migration to the cloud by two years or more. A safe bet is for regional enterprises to look for cloud system integrators with a broad span of cloud related professional services.
A skilled and competent regional, cloud system integrator can provide dashboards for automated controls, consumption usage and SLA reporting, utility-based pricing, virtual or public cloud architectures and specialised government cloud secure platforms. Enterprise CIOs should leverage such partners to enhance their digital strategies, especially around the cloud.
