Businesses can gain agility and better service outcomes with 'bite-size' cloud capabilities, as well as optimise their cloud consumption with a chargeback model.
Organisations today need to be able to move fast and change direction quickly in response to market demand, and they are better placed to do so if their cloud services are compact and consumable.
The biggest problem businesses face today is an inability to keep up with the demand for change. Internal assets and teams simply are not fast enough in adopting new technology, resulting in an organisation that lacks agility and digitisation.
Further exacerbating this is an IT department that is bogged down with the day-to-day operations of ‘keeping the lights on’. This compels employees to seek out their own alternatives in order to quickly respond to customer demand, creating a shadow IT culture that can potentially introduce security risks for the organisation.
To address these challenges, Australian businesses are moving away from internally supplied IT towards consumable technology that is focused on user experience, says John Welsh, Rackspace Technology's APJ Enterprise Architect.
"They want bite-size technology solutions that are small, compact, and easy to consume. This allows them to assess the customer experience and ensure the application remains useful, and quickly pivot to a new service if the supply for the existing one is saturated," Welsh explains.
And a hybrid cloud environment is the best platform to facilitate this, he adds, because it enables businesses to retain some internal processes on-premise while optimising others on public clouds.
"If the company has a new product they want to test and commercialise, they will be able to set up an IT ecosystem that lets them achieve all of that within a couple of months," he says. "With the legacy IT commercial model, they would have to put a business case to the CFO to approve the required budget and wait for months before this eventually comes through. With a hybrid cloud strategy, you're buying services by the month, and even by the hour."
The agility businesses gain from adopting cloud services also combats the problem of shadow IT and, more importantly, allows their employees to gradually learn to adapt to a public cloud environment.
CIOs no longer need to spend hefty sums on cumbersome IT infrastructures, and they along with other business leaders will be able to gain better visibility and control over their Cloud spend.
Specifically, choosing a VMware Cloud (VMC) platform also provides a smoother transition since most traditional IT ecosystems have a VMware footprint. Enterprise systems such as human resource and expense management are typically underpinned with VMware platforms and easily replaced with compatible software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions that are readily available in the market today.
To further ensure their cloud subscriptions are optimised, businesses should implement a chargeback model that monitors and optimises consumption across the organisation. This will enable the CIO to be alerted if an internal business unit is on track to overspend its allocated budget. The CIO then can assess why consumption is high in that unit and determine if resources can be moved from another unit that is under-consuming to plug the gap.
Cloud expenditure for each business unit can be established every month and employees have the flexibility to choose the types of services they want to consume while keeping an eye on their allocated budget.
Welsh says: "Rackspace Technology is focused on productising outcomes for customers and, with VMware, will enable businesses to purchase cloud services more efficiently every month based on actual consumption."
Contact your local rep to find out more about Rackspace Technology's VMC on AWS solution.
