As businesses embrace the cloud in all its complexity, rearchitecting enterprise IT infrastructure becomes a key lever for success. In this article, Karthik Narain, Global Lead for Accenture Cloud First at Accenture, shares how enterprises can leverage the right IT infrastructure to succeed in the cloud.
The move to cloud computing is not a “once and done†process. The cloud is a continuum of capabilities and technologies that provide an operating model for innovation. As, bit by bit, an increasing number of businesses progress down this continuum, we are learning more about the impact cloud will have over the long term, and some of these lessons are very surprising indeed.
Take the effect of the cloud on enterprise network infrastructure. Many may argue that as cloud adoption gathers pace in enterprises, IT infrastructure and IT infrastructure management will decline in importance. However, what we are now seeing is precisely the opposite. The deeper businesses go into the cloud, the more important IT infrastructure becomes.Â
Connecting Dispersed Infrastructure, People and Business Operations
The reason is simple: enterprise IT infrastructure anchors cloud infrastructure and services to the business. It holds together the vast capabilities enabled by the cloud, allowing enterprises to kickstart exceptional operational, customer, and employee experiences.
This is a complex undertaking. As organizations make their way along the Cloud Continuum, they must find a way to balance public, private, hybrid, co-location, multi-cloud, and edge technologies to support a fast-growing range of use cases and applications. For example, they must also connect to an increasingly dispersed environment as computing moves to the edge and home, remote and hybrid working becomes the norm. With IT managers now tasked with providing potentially hundreds of thousands of locations with access to the cloud, the need for modern, secure enterprise networks is evident.Â
The crucial challenge is how to bring order to the complexity of the Cloud Continuum. If infrastructure, processes, and people cannot keep pace with new digital business requirements, then organizations may even see a drop in performance as they move along the Cloud Continuum. Therefore, rearchitecting for the cloud is imperative to realizing the full benefits of the technology.
An Infrastructure Renaissance to Compete Better and FasterÂ
As a result, we are experiencing nothing less than a renaissance of IT infrastructure. Notably, we’re seeing that businesses that understand the importance of IT rearchitecting are driving breakthrough availability, sophistication, and scalability in their infrastructure, enabling them to outcompete their peers.Â
Indeed, it is primarily due to their considered approach to IT infrastructure that digital natives have met with such success. By putting in place modern IT infrastructure, they have spun up new products, moved into new markets, and innovated continually and at speed.Â
See More: How the Cloud Continuum Will Reshape Businesses
A Fit for Purpose Infrastructure
All organizations need to act in the face of this infrastructure renaissance. Of course, exactly how you react will depend on the size of your organization and its position on the Cloud Continuum. However, here’s one thing all enterprises have in common: putting in place a modern infrastructure should be a priority, even if you’re not yet ready to go “all in†on the cloud.Â
At Accenture, we have identified three key steps organizations need to take to ensure their infrastructure capability is fit for purpose:
- Stabilize: First, steady the ship by optimizing your existing infrastructure. Otherwise, you will continue to spin your wheels managing system outages and other infrastructure faults. The automation of processes is crucial as it can help take the strain of dealing with repeat issues and failures.
- Optimize: Next, it is time to ready your infrastructure for a cloud-first future (even if you’re not yet prepared to move into that future). Embracing an infrastructure as a code approach is critical, as it opens the door for DevOps to ramp up the innovation cycle.
- Transform: When ready, the next stage is for enterprises to rearchitect their IT environment root and branch while expanding the infrastructure footprint across the breadth of the Cloud Continuum. The aim is to ensure each workload ends up in the environment that will enable it to deliver optimal value, whether public, private, on-prem, or edge.
Running alongside these three steps is a critical enabler of success — reskilling. Organizations need to invest in their infrastructure engineers to ensure they have the skills necessary to thrive. They will need to gain a good grasp of business strategy and objectives to help rearchitect systems that deliver the organization’s desired user experiences.Â
The cloud has reinvigorated the profession of infrastructure engineering and elevated its importance to the heart of the business. It’s now clear that to succeed in the cloud entirely, organizations must get as serious about infrastructure as they are about software. Companies that do this, stand to make the most of the cloud continuum and deliver operating models that drive competitive differentiation. There’s no time to delay – your rearchitecting journey should start today.Â
Where are you on your cloud rearchitecting journey? Tell us all about it on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window . We’d love to know!
MORE ON CLOUD COMPUTING:Â
Â