70% of CIOs believe that their organizations are being swept over by a stream of digital opportunities. They cannot respond in a timely manner, which threatens the success of the business and the credibility of the IT organization. There is a perception that IT is a bottleneck, and this perception has led to the proliferation of Shadow IT in organizations. In response to these challenges, 55% of CIOs have a second mode of IT operations that is more agile.
Organizations of all sizes are embarking on what is being called the latest in business transformation. Driving this transformation is the growing adoption of cloud technology to increase value across all lines of business. With accelerated time to market, and the ability to provision and scale resources on demand the benefits are numerous. In many cases, this agility and ease of use have allowed business units to circumvent IT “Shadow IT” and quickly deploy resources on their own. This Ad Hoc approach while effective from a tactical stand point can have a significant impact on the IT organization’s ability to maintain corporate standards specifically around security, compliance, and governance. To mitigate these risks and at the same time respond to the increasing demands from the business units IT organizations need to take a strategic approach.
Highlights
- Speed implementation of solutions to address business pain points
- Use a framework approach to lower the cost and risk of solution implementation
- Create a more agile IT infrastructure
- Continuously align your IT infrastructure with the changing needs of the business and technology evolution
The Goal
- Optimize your investment in the Cloud
- Implement a clear business transformation strategy for your entire organization
- Support and define a new operational model
- Deploy an agile process to meet and beat the expectations of your customers and deliver state-of-art next generation business services
- Create repeatable processes
- Meet security and compliance obligations
- Shift IT from a cost center to a profit center
- Establish and sustain a Cloud Competency Center customized to your IT needs
The Challenges
- We don’t know what we don’t know
- Are we addressing all of our security concerns?
- How much Shadow is IT happening?
- Who is deploying resources?
- Are they following our organizational standards?
- What governance do we have in place?
- Is there an audit trail?
- Are logs being created and how are they being handled?
- Who is watching the performance?
- Who is paying for all this?
- What else don’t we know?
Why a Framework
Taking a Framework approach allows organizations to utilize their existing Cloud investment whether it be people, resources or tools while at the same time building a platform that aligns with the current and future business needs.
Resources
Setting the vision and defining the strategy is foundational to your Business transformation success. Having the right resources with the right skills across the entire spectrum is what makes the difference. It is critical for the organization to staff up a Cloud Competency Center with resources that have intimate knowledge of the cloud; deep domain expertise in Cloud infrastructure, Cloud Security, Cloud Automation, Cloud Compliance and Cloud Operations is key to success.
Processes
Agility and self-service capabilities are what businesses want. Defining a repeatable process that addresses these needs while taking into account compliance requirements, financial and governance needs and utilizing best practices is what the business needs. A set of repeatable processes takes into account both needs and wants. Agile development of IT Services will help the IT organization keep pace with the organization’s requirements and technology evolution.
Tools
Like any skilled craftsmen having the right tools and the proper knowledge makes all the difference. Building a self-service, fully automated solution requires not only the right tools and processes but the right skills to build the processes and workflows and the understanding of which tools to use and how best to use them. All with the ultimate goal of providing the business with an agile self-service consumable platform with built in Security, Compliance, and Governance which stays ahead of the IT innovation curve.
