Can more cloud use increase business agility?

Given the steady increase of the use of cloud technologies in the enterprise, it’s logical to expect that additional ways to leverage these resources will be developed. And considering the need for agility from IT leaders to address new and challenging opportunities, it begs the question: Can cloud computing technology increase business agility?

Here, we examine how cloud computing technologies — particularly the many different “as-a-service” offerings such as SaaS, PaaS and IaaS — can be utilized to increase productivity and improve access to business resources, and Agility takes many forms in today’s business world. Organizations in highly competitive and fast-moving industries constantly need to innovate and identify ways to boost productivity, quickly bring new products to market and enhance their ability to maintain long-term viability and success. In several of these industries old, familiar methods are no longer the norm, which could ultimately cause short- and long-term harm to the organization.

Cloud computing technology steadily grows in acceptance and deployment Figure 1 depicts a more-or-less typical technology configuration in which local storage systems carry the burden of application support, with only one cloud-based service in use.

Does this configuration have sufficient resources to create an agile environment? At first glance, the quantity of data storage suggests enough storage is available to support multiple applications that could generate agility collectively. As we don’t have the technical specifications of the various devices, we can only guess at what is possible. The use of a cloud service suggests that the organization employs some sort of managed service for a specialized application, such as a financial suite or CRM system.

That alone doesn’t necessarily mean a state of agility has been achieved. In addition, the method for data backup and recovery needs to be considered — is it solely implemented in local storage or is it a combination of local and cloud storage?

By contrast, let’s examine a somewhat more cloud-focused environment, where an organization utilizes resources from multiple cloud-based resources. Figure 2 depicts a configuration with somewhat less local storage and a greater use of cloud-based resources.

While this kind of configuration isn’t considered the norm today, it certainly is a noteworthy trend. We can see an increased dependence on cloud-based resources, including the “as-a-service” resources, as well as cloud-based, mission-critical applications.

As such, one of the configuration’s key concerns becomes availability of sufficient network bandwidth to support data throughput for all data transactions. And if cloud technology also provides backup and recovery support for applications, virtual machines and mission-critical databases and customer data, the need for bandwidth is critical. Security also becomes a greater concern as resources no longer occupy the safe confines of a data center.