Agility on Cloud – A Vital Part of Cloud Computing
The highly competitive business world requires a lot of business acumen and agility on their part to survive. It requires agility not only in their strategic management process, but also their cloud services. The next question, is how does agility boosts your business?
Agility mean the ability of a business to adapt rapidly and cost efficiently in response to the changes in the business environment. Wikipedia defines Business Agility as “the ability of an organization to rapidly adapt to market and environmental changes in productive and cost-effective ways.” In that framework, cloud applications are fast in several ways.
Breaking down “Agility on Cloud”
Using the Cloud means agility and adding business value. In the cloud computing context, agility often refers to the ability to rapidly develop, test and launch software applications that drive business growth. Cloud Agility allows them to focus on other issues such as security, monitoring and analysis, instead of provisioning and maintaining the resources.
In a business context, agility typically refers to the ability of an organization to rapidly adapt to market and environmental changes in productive and cost-effective ways. The more agile your business is, you can spend less time managing commodity infrastructure and maintaining in-house developed code for non-core programs.
Strategic agility, or “business agility,” can be achieved by quickly adapting goods and services to meet customer demands. Agility is a concept that incorporates the ideas of flexibility, balance, adaptability, and coordination under one umbrella.
In order for businesses to advance rapidly, they need to have a clear picture about how agility can help them. Cloud technology offers businesses a key means of promoting agility, and is a vital tool in the enterprise push toward better adaptability. For companies to benefit from the cloud agility they need to understand what constitutes cloud agility.
Cloud provides the necessary resources for businesses to respond to changing needs. Being able to quickly provision the resources, developing and deploying new infrastructure in minutes or securing a new, SaaS app are big incentives for cloud providers and enablers.
The cloud agile enterprise is an extension of this concept, and it refers to organizations which utilizes these principles of complex adaptive systems to achieve success. It is here that cloud computing’s ability and agility to deliver on-demand compute and development resources is important.
You can achieve Agility in the cloud in a number of ways:
- Quicker Time-to-market:Cloud computing allows companies to significantly decrease the time it takes to provision and de-provision IT infrastructure, speeding delivery of IT projects that are critical to revenue growth or cost reduction. While a physical server could take days or weeks to procure and provision, a cloud server takes minutes. Faster time to market means faster time to revenue.
- Automated allocation of resources: Cloud computing simplifies provisioning, de-provisioning and re-deploying resources through automation and easy-to-use web consoles and APIs. The time for an IT systems administrator spent on managing and supporting cloud infrastructure is reduced greatly compared to that seen in a physical environment.
- Flexibility and Scalability:Cloud computing allows the flexibility for businesses to scale up or down their resources to meet the on-demands or sudden burst in demand or website traffic to meet unpredictable application development or production needs. The pay-per-use flexibility of the cloud, allows end-users to scale fast or “fail fast” based on the demands of the business. Common workloads that require on-demand scalability: testing and development, load testing, seasonal spikes in traffic, a new application etc.
- Adaptive Auto-Scaling:Cloud computing uses API’s, software etc. for accessibility of cloud platforms and services. It is easier to automate IT management and provisioning in a cloud environment. You can integrate business intelligence and analytics platforms, IT monitoring tools with the cloud, allowing the systems to be more adaptive. Ex. new servers can be automatically provisioned (or de-provisioned) when load balancing thresholds are met.
- Faster Innovation:Cloud computing allows companies to support an increased pace of product development and marketing programs that better align IT infrastructure and management costs with the goals and objectives of the business.
So, how does Agility create business value?
The benefits of cloud are enormous and combine it with business agility to add more value. A proper business agility plan will go a long way to boost your presence in the market.
- Faster upgrades of the software.
- Better skill sets for all aspects of your business
- Quick Time to market of your applications.
- Easy scalability and high availability.
- Better access to quality and tested software.
The primary factors for using Cloud Computing may be cost, quicker DevOp and DevTest process, minimized risk and agility. But other strategic goals such as top market position, innovative products and ideas, competition and a productive workforce are the reasons why companies are looking towards the Cloud.
You can leverage the Cloud Agility for your business by writing to us on info@sysfore.com or call us at +91-80-4110-5555.