South African organisations need to make smarter cloud journeys to avoid delays and budget overruns. This is according to Satish Nrusimhadevara, VP & country head of HCLTech, who was speaking during the recent ITWeb Cloud & Data Centre summit.
Nrusimhadevara said cloud adoption has accelerated, but there were indications that many cloud journeys were not progressing smoothly.
“In the context of cloud 3.0 where cloud is essential and every organisation and individual connects to the cloud, the top reasons for organisations to adopt cloud are to be more agile and proactive, to move from capex to opex models, for scalability, and for freedom in deployment choices,” he said.
Some of the reasons for projects running over budget or behind schedule were that there was a lack of early planning on how to manage the workflows and applications once they moved onto the cloud. This is because the traditional on-premise environment is very different from how the cloud behaves.
“A lack of understanding of end-to-end migrations costs organisations a lot of effort, time and budget. There were also unanticipated costs around hardware and software decommissioning, how to manage the early termination of contracts and unplanned bubble costs–including technical debt and the fact that the cloud can become an expensive proposition if not managed well,” Nrusimhadevara continued.
Other major factors impacting cloud success included misaligned business objectives, resistance to change and a lack of skills and organisational readiness.
“We see huge skills deficits in many South African organisations and this is creating these challenges and budget and timeline overruns,” he said.
Nrusimhadevara believes organisations need to be smart in their approach to cloud migration and management to achieve their transformation objectives.
“You must understand before you make the move how the application and workload will behave in the cloud and have a good strategy to support them once they are in the cloud. One of the biggest applications is core ERP, which carries huge amounts of data and sensitive data, and organisations must plan how to manage the ERP once it moves to the cloud."
Once organisations are in the cloud, they need to know what benefits they want to achieve, such as modernisation of applications and data, and how to ensure that the data on the edge is visible to all decision-makers.
One thing that often gets overlooked is the cloud operating model – how well an organisation is aligned to achieve the objectives of the cloud and make sure that the right skills are in place to ensure the applications and workloads are properly managed.
"You need to govern the whole process and create an adaptive cloud strategy. You need to create cloud smart operations, with a frictionless AI automated environment and ensure that costs are kept under control. Once you get these things correct, the cloud journey works according to your timelines and budget," said Nrusimhadevara.
Looking at the role of HCLTech, he outlined how the IT transformation partner has helped customers strategise, roadmap and validate their cloud journeys. This includes choosing the right cloud partners for their environments and testing their applications’ performance in cloud environments with its cloud-native labs. HCLTech also helps customers develop the necessary in-house skills and certifications, while working with them at every stage to support adoption and enablement.
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