Maybe you have only just gotten your head around cloud and here’s Grey Triangle talking about going beyond the cloud! This is not as crazy as it sounds…beyond the cloud is the way we like to talk about digital transformation.
Ah, this can of worms you may be thinking, bear with us.
Information technology should be more than just hardware or software products, we believe it should be seen and understood as an integral part of your organisation, helping the way your people interact with technology, providing new insights and understanding from your data and information (not to mention how it is processed) and support the way your whole business conducts itself, internally and externally.
Now, this really is grand!
As described in our 6 Steps to the Cloud approach, stage 2, Evaluate, really digs deep into how your business works with information technology, or maybe it doesn’t. And that’s the point, moving beyond the cloud is about getting under the covers, understanding how something works and improving it – with the use of technology; digital transformation.
As an IT consulting firm you’d think we’d like to shout about the latest product or widget that’ll change your world, but we don’t. What we like to shout about is business analysis, service architecture and project management.
We believe these three disciplines are what unlocks digital transformation, technology is a key part but it’s a part, not the whole story.
Let’s highlight just some of the questions we work through in taking your organisation beyond the cloud
- What is the business objective and is there a defined technical objective?
- How do you do that today?
- Who is using that product/process today?
- Who needs to use it tomorrow?
- Who is managing it?
- How is it managed?
- When is it needed?
- How much value does it give you/your customer?
- Has this been done before?
- What is good about the product/service today (if a version already exists)?
- What is bad about the product/service today (ask people who use and manage)?
You may think this all sounds logical and straight forward, and you’d be right. However, oftentimes a technology solution can be brought to life without fully understanding the requirements, its total design, its introduction to the organisation and worse yet, its management during its life – including deprecation.
When you start to think about technology in this way and form a service around it (or have it as an integral part of one) then you’re really stepping into digital transformation and beyond the cloud.
Being cloud-specific with this behaviour means breaking down applications (decoupling) and rearchitecting them to be flexible in scaling, resilience, performance and composition. It means being aware of being able to use other solutions that complement and enhance the application – applications and services you can consume on-demand.
It means a departure from just building servers, networks and providing desktops and applications with the way we used to (as examples).
When you look at what can be offered by the major cloud providers natively, their solution stack is huge. At the time of writing Amazon AWS boasted in excess of 160 products and Microsoft Azure over 200 – that is staggering, and this doesn’t include what’s in their respective marketplaces, developed by teams across the world.
All available on-demand!
Grey Triangle can help with taking your organisation to the cloud, and we can help take you beyond it too. Our business analysis, project management, consulting and engineering teams are well placed to discuss your challenge, provide a response and ensure we advance together.
Want to learn more about how Grey Triangle can help take your organisation to the Cloud? Contact us today to discuss your challenge.