More and more Cloud services are becoming available to mine and process massive amounts of corporare data for business advantage.
New and unique ways to leverage the hidden data assets of your organisation is now within reach. Many Cloud Services can easily manage large amounts of data securely and cost-effectively.
This is rapidly disrupting the markets on many fronts. Analysis of Consumer behaviour, their purchasing habits and required marketing campaigns to successfully convert these suspects to paying customers are all now occurring in realtime using powerful cloud technologies. Business models are changing thanks to big data mining in the cloud.
Over 80% of Australian enterprises have been adopting cloud as part of their Digital Business Transformation to modernise legacy systems and to deploy these new workloads.
However, we do see issues when it comes to migrating corporate data to the Cloud. The transition continues to be a slow and painful despite the decline in security, scalability and cost concerns.
The reason? Established enterprises are still stuck with their on-premise databases and backend systems, making it difficult to integrate and maintain the two environments at the same time.
Businesses need more than an operational overhaul, they need a cultural revolution!
- Make your data flow seemlessly
Hybrid environments are a necessity. But, in order for the cloud integration to save costs and drive efficiencies, it’s important that the data flows in both directions: from the company to the cloud, and from the cloud to your people and processes.
Creating a data pipeline, dividing updates into micro-batches and streaming are the main areas to focus on. Using office365 and K2 in conjunction will help building hybrid applications fast to ensure important data flows well within your enterprise.
It is critical that you improve and maintain your data quality. Hybrid enviornments will genrate new data and using tools like hyperfish to ensure user profiles are accurate and complete will be important.
- Put policy-based governance in place
An increasing number of enterprises are coming to terms with using cloud for big data as part of their digital business transformation agenda.
In the absence of proper policies to control who can provision which workloads to the cloud, or where to deploy it and at what capacity, enterprises are putting their data at significant risk.
Enterprises need to put policy-based governance in place to address cloud security. Given the speed at which technology moves, companies ned to acquire sufficient training from their cloud service providers such as AWS or Microsoft to use their evolving security features correctly.
- Introduce organisation-wide cultural change
The lack of digital first mindset when adopting cloud for corporate data can significantly hinder staff productivity.
People not only tend to resist change, but the pressure to using Cloud can result in de-prioritisation of key business activities.
Management needs to closely introspect its natural course of business functions, analyse how information will be stored, retrieved and utilised to carry out tasks and hence complement existing business processes.
In order to lead a cultural change, enterprises need to have an people driven approach.
- Engage cloud providers who work with your processes
Enterprises eager to reap the rewards of moving their data to cloud, are likely to come across a variety of providers with varying capabilities and pricing models.
Finding a provider that can understand your needs and is able to provide a solution that fits well with the existing processes, can be challenging.
The key lies in carefully crafting your requirements and finding the right balance between the services you need to outsource versus the skills you need to develop in-house.
Finally, evaluate your options and choose a provider that is able to enhance your overall business capabilities in the long run.
Summary
Adopting cloud is more than a one-time massive transfer of on-premise data centres to the cloud.
While the challenges are daunting for enterprises making a transition for the first time, the benefits of a successful cloud integration can be transformational.
Creating a two-way data pipeline, putting cloud specific policies in place, driving cultural change and finding the right provider, are some of the ways enterprises can overcome cloud integration challenges.
jEyLaBs Consultants have been assisting enterprises move operations to the cloud as part of their Digital Business Transformation agenda.
If you need help with performing an impact analysis, feel free to get in-touch with us at cloud@jeylabs.com.
Want to learn how we have assisted other enterprises like yours? Read some of our success stories here.
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