Cloud, key to driving business agility

The cloud is often considered a key driver of business agility. Business agility (AKA operational excellence) enables enterprises to quickly respond to change and deliver value at speed and scale. Historically, enterprise IT has struggled with speed and scale. A cloud center of excellence (CCE) can be of rescue. Cloud-native applications are more agile than legacy apps. Cloud-native apps break up the traditional monolith into smaller, loosely coupled services that communicate through APIs. These microservices can be developed and deployed independently, driving greater flexibility and agility." 

The cloud is often considered a key driver of business agility.

The 2021 State of The Cloud Report showed that 59 percent of organizations plan to focus on cloud migration. This is good news since the cloud has numerous benefits for every organization that employs it. The cloud enables developers to build apps that are scalable and can be deployed quickly, which allows companies to focus on building apps instead of managing infrastructure. Cloud computing is also a key enabler of business agility because it allows organizations to make the move from legacy infrastructure to cloud-native tools and architectures. 

Business agility refers to being able to quickly respond to market conditions (e.g., changes in customer demands), adapt accordingly, and capitalize on opportunities as they arise—all within an ever-changing landscape where technology innovation is accelerating at an exponential pace every year. It enables enterprises to quickly respond to change and deliver value at speed and scale. It’s a key driver of business success, competitive advantage, market leadership, and customer satisfaction.

The ability to effectively implement new ideas is vital for organizations that want to remain relevant in today's increasingly digital economy where customers expect timely responses from their suppliers. Ineffective implementation can lead to poor customer experience or even worse — lost - sales opportunities!

Historically, enterprise IT has struggled with speed and scale.

The cloud can help, but it's not the only solution. As an enterprise IT department, you need to think about how you're going to address your scale and speed challenges in a way that makes sense for your organization. Cross-functional teams are more agile when working together with shared resources and tools like Azure DevOps Services (ADAS). It doesn't matter whether or not they're using virtual machines; what matters is working together efficiently from any location on earth!

Project budgets drive agility because they allow organizations like yours—with limited budgets—to experiment with new technologies without having any upfront costs associated with them right away. This gives people who aren't experts at building software products time before diving in headfirst into development workflows like continuous integration/continuous deployment cycles which require extensive planning before every single build gets run through them again later down the line

A cloud center of excellence (CCE) can help.

A CCOE is a central point of reference for all things cloud. It ensures that the cloud is used to support the business, and it's responsible for ensuring that your organization has a strong strategy in place to drive business agility through the adoption of cloud technologies. It also develops and maintains a governance model for using the cloud across your entire enterprise so that you can take advantage of its benefits without sacrificing control or risk management at any level within your organization.

As part of this effort, you'll need to establish key partnerships with outside vendors who will be responsible for delivering specific services on behalf of your company—including infrastructure as well as software applications—to help ensure proper utilization and manageability across multiple departments within any given departmental structure (i.e., finance versus human resources).

Cloud-native applications are more agile than legacy apps.

The cloud is a key driver of business agility. It’s why companies are moving to the cloud, and it’s one of the reasons why they want more from their IT operations teams: to be able to deliver new applications quickly and efficiently without having any impact on existing systems or data centers. Cloud-native applications are built using modern programming languages like Java, Scala, .NET Core, and NodeJS with no requirements for traditional server infrastructures such as Web servers or application servers; instead, they use lightweight containers (such as Docker) running on virtual machines in the cloud for deployment. This gives developers greater flexibility when designing apps because changes can be made quickly without having any negative impact on production environments—and since each container has its version number, there's no risk of breaking things by making changes across multiple versions simultaneously!

Cloud-native applications also tend towards scalability through horizontal scaling techniques such as auto-scaling groups that automatically add new instances based on demand; vertical scaling uses Docker Compose files which enable you to scale your infrastructure independently depending upon how much memory/CPU etc needed during runtime conditions thus allowing individual components within your application stack

Cloud-native apps break up the traditional monolith into smaller, loosely coupled services that communicate through APIs. 

Microservices enable you to develop and deploy applications independently, driving greater flexibility and agility.

Microservices are small, autonomous services that perform a single function within an application or service. They typically have a small number of responsibilities and loosely coupled components, making it easier for developers to implement new features without affecting existing functionality. Microservices can also be scaled horizontally (horizontally scaling) or vertically (vertically scaling). This means that your application will run on multiple servers at the same time instead of having everything stored in one place like a traditional monolithic architecture would have done with all its data being centralized in one place only so there would be no redundancy if something goes wrong with any server out there then all affected users will experience downtime until engineers fix/replace faulty parts quickly. They are small, independent services that communicate through APIs. Each service is responsible for a single business function, such as data storage or payment processing. They can be developed and deployed independently from other microservices and/or traditional applications (e.g., CRMs).

Microservices are loosely coupled by nature, making them easier to scale when needed. They also make it easy for developers to quickly build new functionality into their organizations’ cloud-native apps without having to worry about breaking existing code or requiring extensive changes in infrastructure design or deployment configurations.

Legacy apps often have deep integration into other parts of the technology infrastructure, making them difficult to move to the cloud or decommission.

The first challenge is that legacy apps are not designed for modularity. They're built around individual functions and don't allow for easy extension or replacement via plugins or APIs—they just aren't flexible enough to support this kind of change cost-effectively. Complementing the technical challenges of moving legacy applications to the cloud are organizational challenges. 

Your Take Away:

The first step in moving your business to the cloud is knowing what you're getting into. You need a strategy for managing your existing technology investments and then planning for the future. But this can be difficult, especially if you don't have a good understanding of your legacy applications and how they work today.

A CCE can help you develop a systematic approach for defining, adopting, and managing your cloud strategy. A CCE is made up of subject matter experts who specialize in specific areas such as security, governance, or disaster recovery; they provide insight into how these technologies may impact their organizations' bottom lines over time while also helping them understand their current position on the technological ladder—and where they want to go next about those same technologies (or not).

For example, it's not uncommon for siloed teams within an organization to duplicate efforts or build solutions on top of one another without realizing it. In some cases, this can lead to poor performance and increased maintenance costs when you shift your workloads into the cloud. You must have a clear roadmap for selecting technologies and vendors so that your needs are met early in the process. It will also be critical to ensure that all technical challenges are addressed before moving legacy applications into the cloud environment

A CCOE helps you properly select technologies and vendors, create a roadmap for your journey, adopt new development techniques and get the right resources in place to ensure success in your quest for agility. When it comes to selecting the right technologies and vendors, a CCOE can help you create a roadmap that is aligned with your company's goals. By understanding how and why each technology fits into your business model, you'll be able to make informed decisions when choosing new capabilities or building out new features.

If you're looking for ways to improve upon existing capabilities or add new ones, a CCOE can also help ensure that these changes are implemented efficiently and effectively so they don't disrupt your current operations too much. This includes identifying potential bottlenecks within an organization (such as resource constraints), developing strategies for addressing them without negatively impacting employees' productivity levels (like having everyone work from home), and assessing available resources needed for implementing these changes successfully (ease of integration vs cost), etcetera...