Moving to the cloud is not a question of if, it’s when. The sheer scale and cost of global business on-premise is increasing at a rate un-sustainable to stay competitive and provide the real-time experience users expect and demand. Just think of a few quick examples of rising costs:
- Power for server rooms
- Multiple sites for disaster recovery
- Data storage growth
- Proximity to global users and geographical balancing
Even for large Fortune 100 and 500 companies, it no longer makes sense to maintain the growing cost of these challenges. In business, leverage is key; winning organizations will move to leverage the cloud to their advantage and stay ahead of market demand.
Can you reach the Cloud?
Every year or two we hear Business Process Management (BPM) is dead, or Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is where we need to be; and the pundits will say that too is dead, or short lived.
A keen focus on your processes is never more important than during a technological shift, especially in regards to Moving to the Cloud. Transforming your business execution, or processes, to the cloud is not a lift-and-shift exercise. That just does not work.
Cloud infrastructure, when leveraged appropriately, often requires a re-engineering of legacy design.
- Micro-services
- Eliminate single points of failure
- Reduce data packets
- Stateless process context
- Seamless recovery
Just a few examples of design aspects often lacking in large, monolithic legacy systems.
Are your processes ready for the Cloud?
We must analyze, categorize, and prepare our business processes to leverage the cloud.
- Process Maturity Matrix
- Prioritize investment
- Re-engineer to Design for Cloud
It is of upmost importance to understand the impact of a cloud based infrastructure and avoid the pitfalls of implementing technology for technologies sake.
Where can you automate?
Whether you’re looking to accelerate and reduce transaction costs through automation with traditional system-to-system communications using Application Program Interfaces (API’s) or utilizing User Interface (UI) touch points to automate with RPA technologies, mimicking human behavior, are your processes ready?
- Do you have level 4 and 5 tasks and activities defined in order to accurately design such automations?
- Are these API’s and UI’s cloud ready?
- How do we manage a hybrid state across cloud and on-premise?
Build a program road-map that aligns with defined business processes and the opportunity for improvement to leverage the advantages of a cloud infrastructure. Understand pain-points and design paradigms. Legacy systems were not built with Cloud in mind, it did not exist then. Avoid the pitfalls of pride in legacy ownership. It’s no-one’s fault, designers did the best with what they had; but now we have new toys.
In many cases, if you’re not starting over from the ground up with this in mind, you’re just going backwards…. You’ll thank me later.
