TALKING

Simon Bennett , EMEA CTO , Rackspace Technology

Firstly , businesses now expect the pace of Digital Transformation to remain high . Secondly , some organisations have lost sight of the need to take stock of the changes and transformations they are making , which is vital if they are to ensure crucial elements such as cost effectiveness , security and overall value of the changes made are meeting their business ’ goals .

For many companies , the past year has also been the first time they have truly begun to embark on a Digital Transformation journey and the first time that business-led change has been driving the technology agenda . As a result , IT teams have been forced to quickly react to business needs , ideas or innovations and find solutions .

This has largely involved taking capabilities that may exist as individual components and applying them to build a solution or service that meets an organisation ’ s specific requirements .

Keeping it clear , concise and objective

The consequence of this segmented approach is that some crucial elements can be forgotten , such as networking and security . This is where the digital agenda is moving from a simple cloud-based application to something more complex .

What we are witnessing now is the need to reconsider how end-to-end design is changing the best way to merge the ready-made services in the cloud from a hyperscale or SaaS provider with the telecoms world , while providing connectivity in a secure manner .

How does this manifest itself during a transformation within an organisation and , importantly , how can a business align its strategy to its implementation ? The answer lies in having concise messaging built upon a clear strategy .

The purpose and plans should be well structured and clearly articulated across the entire business without agendas , local solutions or individual preferences . That ’ s because these can be highly disruptive , leading to cost and time-to-value challenges , which can in turn risk losing buy-in from the wider business .

It ’ s not all down to the cloud provider

For the first time , Digital Transformation puts the network right at the heart of a business and its internal changes , which is vital as the value of data increases .

Solutions are increasingly going to either span multiple hyperscale cloud providers with data moving between

them , or services will be delivered concurrently from multiple clouds for true portability of service . As such , the following becomes true :

1 . Understanding where data flows from and to becomes a key design point

2 . When a component fails , resilience is imperative . This is especially true in regulated environments when recovery actions need to be conducted in a specific order and actively managed .

3 . Due to concentration risk and regulatory frameworks , services will need to be able to operate on multiple clouds – either separately or concurrently in the future . Therefore , load balancing and data synchronisation of transactions will become key challenges to overcome .

With all of this in mind , non-functional designs as well as the functional elements are still crucial and cannot simply be left to the cloud provider , which is still what many businesses believe .

Resilience of a service and recovery actions in the event of a failure need deep thought and

Purpose and plans should be well structured and clearly articulated across the entire business without agendas .

www . intelligentcio . com INTELLIGENTCIO MIDDLE EAST 37