Cloud is seen as a key enabler to their digital future, however cloud adoption isn’t just about IT infrastructure. How can executives develop a holistic approach towards cloud modernization to ensure their investments pay off?
As ‘digital’ engulfs business strategies, large-scale financial services players need to develop smarter ways to adapt and accelerate technological change. They are also under constant pressure from fintech’s operating on agile systems, rolling out products and services at speed. The pace of innovation at large firms often suffers due to the scale of operations, monolithic tech infrastructure, ‘people alignment’ and old ways of working. Challenges brought about by COVID require even greater levels of resilience and agility to navigate.
More firms than ever are using cloud-led modernization as a catalyst for holistic enterprise transformation, and crucially, this should lead to adaptable business models that can sustain growth and weather future uncertainties in an ever-changing milieu. To maximize the value from investment, operating models need to align closely business and tech strategies.
A democratized approach needs to be implemented enterprise wide and with that, a portfolio management approach to balance the long-term evolution of the underlying platform whilst pursuing growth with new products and features. Technology modernization is also an enabler for lean product management practices such as low-cost rapid experimentation for exploring and exploiting innovative opportunities.
Organizational, as well as technological change is needed to ensure teams can tap into the acceleration and agility that cloud-based architecture promises. Organizations need a mind shift- moving from a top-down decision culture to an empowered agile workforce that can continuously deliver on strategic business outcomes.
Here are the highlights from June 2021 IBM/Forrester study
- Modernizing existing applications and infrastructure is a top digital transformation goal for over 40% of IT decision-makers.
- Cloud adoption is increasing, but enterprise-class servers and storage are still highly relevant. Eighty-two percent of IT leaders (from companies currently using enterprise-class servers and storage) believe that enterprise systems will play an increasingly important role in the future of their business in supporting key business workloads.
- The ability to manage applications across a hybrid cloud infrastructure is critical for application modernization. Poor alignment of people, processes, and technology is one of the biggest challenges that organizations face when modernizing applications with hybrid clouds. Standards (especially those based on open-source projects) can help teams maximize their modernization efforts on-premises and in the
- public cloud.
- Skill gaps create modernization risk. While firms are increasingly confident in their ability to operate cloud-native applications, they are less confident in the level of development, testing, and DevOps skills available for application modernization. As a result, many are cautious and are looking to keep efforts close to home with a hybrid cloud approach.
As per this study, for most business leaders, modernizing existing applications and infrastructure is a key transformation objective and improving customer experience is their top priority.
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