Are We Ready for the Cloud?

Sunil Ganjoo The author is the director IT, Dell Services
Delivery, India

Information technology has been a highly emphatic and innovative industry sector in the last decade. IT industrys primary goal is to ease business transactions, simplify process executions, and enhance effectiveness of human interventions. This has often driven the industry leaders to think beyond business and sales targets, and evolve new methodologies to generate revenue through productivity drives. The emerging technologies and solutions have significant impact on the way IT enabled business processes are established.

Among these emerging technologies, cloud services will impact the traditional operations model of IT and compel realignment of the IT services and people strategy, to enable organizations to focus on primary business practices while relying on global service providers to facilitate their IT environments, independent of infrastructure and support.

The focus is not only to choose right suited IT services for business, but also to partner with appropriate, well-established players in the market to ensure sustained, reliable and seamless transition to cloud based systems. This change, in turn, will drive the people strategy within organizations as there is a need to detach the physical dependency on infrastructure and real-time availability of an employee in office premises. With globalization and the ability to leverage talent available across different locations, the organization will need to re-evaluate IT infrastructure and support models that facilitate remote IT environment for employees to operate from remote/non-office locations.

An important question isis cloud computing overhyped? Gartner in fact calls it the peak of inflated expectations but nonetheless, it has the potential for bringing in a paradigm shift in the way companies access information and applications without necessarily having to expend huge resources for it. But it is important to note here how it may begin to change our perspective towards work-life balance.

The integrated network and tools available can provide employees freedom to operate from his desirable location. For instance, the mobile workstation with secured data network, conferencing tools and reliable voice solutions facilitates perfect remote work environment for an employee to operate in productive manner. It avoids the hassle of battling the traffic, minimizes commute time and reduces carbon footprint, offering a better work-life balance without any compromise on being a productive employee. The model also ensures business continuity in case of catastrophic and other crisis that can impact the business performance and operations.

It will be interesting to see how these transformations impact other relevant areasoffice layout designs towards a common shared model to increase seating density, creation of enclosed spaces where employees can meet informally, common areas for breaks, and wireless LAN and dynamic telephony for greater mobility. The most compelling benefits include real estate cost savings, an enhanced ability to collaborate, and increased employee satisfaction.

While these trends are inevitable, proactive positioning can assist organizations to operate with optimized model with readiness to accommodate change without radical investments and last-minute rush. The IT industry is shaping to offer services and infrastructure that can provide CIOs the flexibility to operate and change without being hostage to legacy infrastructure and support engagements.