Following the outbreak of COVID-19, most business operations were stalled, productivity decreased, revenues dropped because operations were based mainly on traditional on-premise infrastructure, with little or no plans for cloud adoption. This forced organisations to function in a non-optimised manner. A positive impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is that it has stretched organisations to see new possibilities and capabilities in areas that they are unprepared to navigate. One such area is cloud adoption.
Yes, COVID-19 has forced organisations to adopt a survival strategy by moving some aspects of their workforce, processes, and technologies to the cloud to survive. But the question remains is survival enough?
Before this time, organisations built traditional infrastructure with fortified network boundaries which they held on to as a safe heaven. Remote working was seen as exposing the organisational protected network boundaries beyond the traditional datacentre. Statistics across the Nigerian business environment showed that the significant reason organisations are slow in migrating to the cloud is lack of infrastructure, security concerns, and change management.
In addition, business continuity facilities comprised of an alternate site with similar infrastructure as the primary data processing site. Connectivity required some complex algorithms and configurations to ensure effective failover for services requiring low Recovery Time Objective (RTO). Not only that this is expensive, it still does not guarantee the 99.9% availability needed for most of the application and services.
Nevertheless, now across the globe, productivity and collaboration tool providers such as Microsoft, Cisco, and Zoom are experiencing increased subscriptions due to the pandemic. Therefore, there will be continuous growth in the demand for cloud infrastructure services. This spending will be focused on remote working employees as firms are encouraging employees to work from home. Post COVID-19, many organisations will not go back to the traditional way of working, as the pandemic has shown that remote working is possible. Employees are also a factor to consider as organisations that have adopted, and standardised remote operation will become the most courted bride. Employees will prefer to work from home as against losing productive working hours to commuting.
For some businesses, cloud adoption and remote working have become the new normal, and smart organisations will be looking for quick ways to standardise their activities to support and adapt to changes in work style because of the pandemic. Cloud adoption is not a walk in the park; it requires careful planning, architecture/design, implementation, and support. Beyond survival and as businesses restart, organisations need a planned strategy on cloudification. The various aspects of the organisations, business, technology, the application, data, and security have to be architected and appropriately designed to meet business needs. It is vital to support cloud adoption with the right strategy, governance framework, processes, people, and migration roadmap to ensure digital transformation benefits in the future.
At pcl. we support organisations who are eager to develop or change their existing digital strategy to remain agile in the face of changing environment. pcl. supports in developing and reviewing IT strategy, cloud strategy, and migration roadmaps to ensure proper alignment between cloud migration plans and business goals and priorities.
Written by:
Ben Nnatuanya
Senior Consultant
