The marketplace for cloud services has become increasingly competitive, with providers introducing new capabilities daily.
For example, artificial intelligence and machine learning have put data science into the hands of the business, yielding unprecedented insight into market behavior, financial performance and customer journeys, informing new payment products and marketing campaigns such as loyalty products.
But all too often, problems are being encountered during cloud adoption that are eroding the value proposition and causing CIOs headaches.
The most common sources of these issues is not within the core capabilities of the cloud services themselves, but found in the assessment, migration and operational planning.
Intent on rapidly capturing the value and benefits of these new services, companies too often take a path of least resistance to cloud assessment and operational planning. This opens the door to a variety of challenges.
Security. Rapidly scalable infrastructure services, combined with self-service provisioning, have made the enforcement of consistent security standards difficult. Highly publicized data breaches mean vulnerability management is often a board-level priority. This can put the CIO and CSO at odds with each other as the desire to expand cloud-based service capability runs up against the charter to protect sensitive financial data.
Cost. The ROI for cloud transformation initiatives often fails to meet financial projections due to lack of cost controls around self-service provisioning and unpredictable public cloud costs such as network egress.
Regulatory controls. As data traverses this diverse ecosystem of cloud services, ensuring that regulatory requirements continue to be met becomes a challenge. Implementing and maintaining consistent data retention policies and reporting capabilities for audit and compliance is a difficult task as cloud services expand.
Maintaining service. Service dependencies are often overlooked or oversimplified during cloud migration planning. The practice of server-based cloud suitability assessments without a clear view of service dependencies can cause service degradation or outright service failure when the migration is executed.
Oversimplified assessments and operational plans are the roots of failure during cloud transformation efforts. Too often the new technology and capabilities of cloud providers monopolize the assessment and business case. Service dependencies, cost control mechanisms, ITSM integration and regulatory compliance require the same time and attention as the new capabilities being introduced by cloud technologies.
A business-focused cloud assessment emphasizing end-to-end services and future-state operations will help prevent common issues. Technology executives shouldn’t let new capabilities monopolize the effort. Working together with this advice, they should also embrace evolving cloud-based technologies, but also be aware of these common issues and understand why they are reoccurring in the industry.
