Cloud Series: Agility in the Cloud Transformation

Digital Transformations to the cloud offer many opportunities to adopt new methodologies along with the new technology. Opportunities to implement new processes and to innovate at a faster rate. What this means is that organizations cannot adopt new technology while keeping legacy operations. An organization must be ready to modernize practices and embrace agility. Agility which the cloud enables by allowing companies to be fast, efficient, and scale at will with the on-demand burst of capacity.

The on-demand burst of capacity brings the ability for companies to react quickly to any market condition. Nowadays, industries such as retail and energy, can swiftly assess and pivot their organization to respond to a fast-changing economic market. A great example and tool that allows for this is artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.

With the large amounts of datasets that companies continuously gather, AI and machine learning can be utilized to automate the analysis of these large volumes of data and predict how current and future market conditions will affect the organization. These automation tools are a way to focus human efforts elsewhere more demanding in the company, all while gaining those advantages of machine learning. Advantages such as reducing cost, avoiding the human-error factor in the analysis process (humans may overlook deeper trends when analyzing data) and staying ahead of the curve in the market. Conducting these high-end analytics with legacy infrastructure can obviously be costly. Additionally, conducting legacy operations with new technology is counter-productive and against the agile methods.

There are also cultural benefits from the agile methods that come from the transformation to cloud. Agile benefits entail cooperative collaboration, strong leadership to drive the transformation, and focused teams to execute projects. An agile culture allows for constant experimentation and learning. Then, learning from mistakes and making the necessary adjustments quickly in 30-day sprints.

In a nutshell, we advocate for agility in the cloud transformation for organizations looking to increase their time-to-market, "automate and allocate" resources, and increase flexibility thereby allowing for better scalability.