These days, businesses are inundated with headlines about the benefits of the cloud. If you peruse business solutions news stories on any given day, you’re bound to come across stories that discuss how the cloud drives down costs, increases storage space and leads to better business for all industrial sectors, from high tech and life sciences to industrial manufacturing.
“What does cloud agility mean – and how can that benefit your business?”
But of the many cloud advantages that are discussed in articles related to this topic, there’s one recurring term that deserves some unpacking: agility. For all the appearances of this term in cloud-based coverage – and there are many – there tends to be a lack of explanation about exactly what agility is and how it precisely benefits business.
Breaking down cloud agility
An agile business is one that’s able to adapt to both internal and external factors in a timely and streamlined fashion. An agile company meets the problems of today with forward-focused solutions; an organization that lacks agility finds itself impeded when it confronts these same challenges. All business leaders want to think of their companies as agile, but it remains a difficult thing to attain.
Part of what makes being an agile business a challenge is that the standards by which it’s achieved are always evolving. A life sciences business that met the standards of industry agility in 2012, for instance, is no longer agile if it hasn’t adapted since then. Agility, in short, is about retaining the ability to advance rapidly. Cloud technology offers businesses a key means of promoting agility, and it’s therefore a central tool in the enterprise push toward better adaptability. But in order for companies to benefit from the agility that’s possible in the cloud, they need to understand what constitutes cloud agility.
“Cloud technology offers businesses a key means of promoting agility – if they know how to use it.”
As CIO contributor Bernard Golden has pointed out, it’s a mistake to characterize cloud agility as the process by which the cloud makes business IT departments run faster. While more streamlined IT functionality is one positive element associated with cloud migration, Golden asserted that true cloud agility refers to a bigger process: “The application of cloud computing to business agility, speeding business innovation to the marketplace.”
Cloud agility: Do businesses know how to use it?
Golden, in short, was arguing that there was no future for cloud computing that didn’t positively impact “mainline business processes.” The cloud isn’t just an IT optimizer, Golden argued, it’s a business optimizer.
In the years since Golden’s piece was published, the cloud has come to occupy a more centralized place in enterprise operations, and the term “cloud agility” has become increasingly linked with agility overall. With the mounting business move toward mobility and deployment of future-focused technologies like Internet of Things devices in the corporate network, maintaining a robust cloud is pivotal to the success or failure of a broad range of organizations today. Whereas businesses in 2010 – the year Golden published his piece – were largely approaching cloud deployments in a tentative way, today migrations are often bold and sweeping.
But as new Oracle research revealed, businesses may be overestimating just how agile they are in the cloud. Tune in to part two of this article to read about how big business employees may not be experiencing the level of cloud agility they think they are. Because of this, as we’ll point out, the responsibility falls on companies to make the forward cloud strides that will result in true agility for their staffers and the entire organization.
