Businesses are keen to take advantage of innovative applications to improve their performance, and so are opting for the Cloud. Without always informing the IT manager or CIO... Mainly concerned with security, the CIO is sometimes reluctant to migrate to the Cloud. Relying on a private Cloud can bring everyone together.
How to boost growth? To answer this question, Gartner has introduced a new way of thinking about IT. This new paradigm is called bimodal computing.
IT resources must be organized according to two models:
- A model focused on stability. It is traditional and sequential. Risk control and business transformation are its two priorities;
- An agility-driven model. Exploratory and non-linear, it emphasizes agility and speed by taking risks while controlling costs through cloud and automation.
Shadow IT
In this new configuration, the private cloud can satisfy business needs and promote new business models.
As they embark on their digital transformation, business leaders are increasingly feeling the pressure to provide high-performance tools. The Cloud meets this need by facilitating the implementation of business applications. For the various departments, this option presents a real opportunity to focus on their core business, rather than on IT evolution.
But in their desire to move fast, some departments have no hesitation in bypassing the CIO or IT manager by subscribing to cloud applications themselves. This is known as Shadow IT. A widespread practice.
Read also: CIO: 4 actions to become a driving force for innovation
According to a study carried out by NTT Research, 78% of business managers admit to using Cloud services without informing their IT department, and 83% of them admit that they will intensify this type of usage even further.
This practice worries CIOs, whose primary concern remains the security of data and data flows. To avoid this, CIOs need to anticipate and offer viable solutions.
A personalized environment
Hence the importance of relying on a private cloud (on site or in a dedicated hosted environment) to better control data security and confidentiality, while offering a solution that satisfies employees.
Has the public cloud eaten its fill?
In any case, in France, 66% of respondents (500 interviews) to Pure Storage's latest study (October 2017) even said they had reduced their use of the public cloud over the past 12 months due to these security issues.
A catalog of services
A private infrastructure can offer a level of service (flexibility, accessibility...) and turnaround time that meets employees' requirements. This new environment can be customized to meet unique needs.
The private cloud offers three advantages for businesses:
- Fast time-to-market : from months to hours. Developers can leverage a set of tools, environments and containers to streamline their projects. This reduces the number of steps in the cycle.
- A self-service catalog : this makes it very easy to automate the deployment, integration and management of business-specific applications.
- Reduced costs: even if the company has to manage its own cloud maintenance, using virtualization reduces costs.
By offering a wide range of applications via a secure platform, the IT Department can also control usage and access by business functions according to their profile. Providing a marketplace also facilitates the maintenance and compatibility of applications with each other and with operating systems.
Data governance
But that doesn't mean you should put everything in a cloud, even if it's a private one. Highly specialized business applications should be excluded. Cloud migration is a complex business. As we saw in a previous article, it's sometimes very difficult to optimize, a posteriori, software based on certain system architectures.
As we have seen, the use of a private Cloud offers advantages for the business. The success of an internal structure project depends on perfect collaboration between the business and IT departments, so that everyone's requirements can be met through compromise.
