Be Agile
In nature, a species’ ability to adapt to its surroundings is often key to its long-term survival. The same could be said for modern businesses.
Take the first step…
Change is inevitable, but the speed of change seems to have been accelerating in recent years. This can make long-term planning difficult for many organisations so, when the long term is unpredictable, the best option is to make sure your business is agile enough to cope with change.
As with many company-wide initiatives, agility isn’t limited to one aspect of the business. Like digital transformation, agility impacts people and process as well as technology. When rapid change is required, technology is a key enabler, but cultural flexibility can also play a significant role.
From an IT infrastructure perspective, agility encompasses three core elements: flexibility, scalability and responsiveness. An agile IT environment is one that can support the rapid deployment (or decommissioning) of products and services. Importantly, this includes the ability to scale up and down to meet varying demands, plus the ability to introduce smaller, incremental improvements in support of a strategy of continuous innovation.
Data and workflows to the cloud
For many businesses, agility is synonymous with migrating services, data and workflows to the cloud. It’s easy to see why, as scalability and utility are two of the founding principles of public cloud infrastructure. In practice, moving traditional on-premises functionality like communications infrastructure, storage and computing power to the cloud rapidly increases the ability to scale services and broaden accessibility to critical data and applications.
Reduced time for deployment
Speed of provisioning new services is one of the major appeals of an agile cloud environment. If it takes too long to bring a new service online, there could be an opportunity cost that impacts the long-term profitability of the business. If the window of opportunity is short, but the time to market is long, the opportunity may be missed altogether.
Of course, a reduced time for deployment is not the only advantage of an agile IT infrastructure. Cloud resources can be used to trial new services without the need to commit to additional on-premises storage and computing power. Multiple configurations can be tested in virtual environments to assess the most efficient setup before deploying across the business. This can help dramatically increase user adoption and reduce the “bedding in” period of new services.
Financial advantages
There are financial advantages to adopting an agile approach to IT. By migrating services to the cloud, or deploying cloud-native solutions, a business can replace capital expenditure (which is increasingly difficult to build a business case for) with operational expenditure (which is more predictable and can be tied directly to bottom-line profitability).
AdEPT cover the Operational Agility essentials
How can we help?
AdEPT empower organisations by uniting their technology, networking and data, providing seamless communication and the confidence to innovate. All underpinned by the latest security. And all with minimal fuss. We are perfectly placed to deliver a service you can trust. You can read more about some of our recent work in this area, by reading our case studies.
