FEATURE
Migrating infrastr to the cloud
– what the Board needs By Johnny Carpenter, Director of Sales EMEA, iland
If you serve on the board of a UK organisation, it’s likely that digital transformation is high on your agenda as you look strategically at futureproofing your business. A key part of that is ensuring that the IT infrastructure supporting your company is functioning robustly as a platform on which to build competitiveness, rather than a legacy anchor holding back innovation and growth. Moving to an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IAAS) set-up is increasingly the way that companies aim to unlock potential and enable more dynamic, flexible business processes. The benefits of IAAS are clear: It’s flexible
Johnny Carpenter, Director of Sales EMEA, iland.
and can easily scale as your business grows. It removes the burden of maintaining legacy systems and allows the easy deployment of new technology and, ideally, you only pay for what you use on a predictable opex basis; you won’t be paying to maintain capacity that is rarely needed. It also allows you to add on services such as analytics and disaster recovery-as-a-service and it’s the perfect environment for the big data projects requiring large workloads and integration with business intelligence tools. All these drivers mean that boards can be under pressure to
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quickly sign off on cloud migration projects. However, it could be a case of more haste, less speed if boards don’t ask the right questions before they sign on the dotted line. It’s important that decision makers don’t simply view IAAS as a commodity purchase – there are a range of providers from hyperscalers to vertical sector specialists and they’re not all the same. Boards must undertake due diligence when making the IAAS decision and there are some key questions that should be asked to ensure that the project delivers both the operational and also the strategic outcomes required.
What’s the scale of our ambition and what business outcomes do we want to see?
We tend to see cloud migration projects falling into one of two camps. In the first, businesses simply want to “lift and shift” their current operations and replicate them exactly in a cloud environment. Naturally they want to see the benefits of cost and flexibility, but fundamentally they want a similar experience after the migration to what they had before. The second scenario
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