{"id":28820,"date":"2019-09-09T12:07:08","date_gmt":"2019-09-09T11:07:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/?p=28820"},"modified":"2019-09-13T12:45:56","modified_gmt":"2019-09-13T11:45:56","slug":"bluegrass-ceo-resistance-to-change-is-the-biggest-reason-for-failure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/2019\/09\/09\/bluegrass-ceo-resistance-to-change-is-the-biggest-reason-for-failure\/","title":{"rendered":"Bluegrass CEO: Resistance to change is the biggest reason for failure"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

People are resistant to change, and this is the main reason why cloud migrations tend to fail. That is according to Bluegrass CEO Nick Durrant, who adds that business leaders must ensure their cloud strategy is aligned with their business goals, because a lack of vision from management and staff will have an enormous effect on the success or failure of cloud migrations.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Old technology may keep the business ticking over, but it also\nseverely inhibits change. It also consumes budgets and limited resources that\nshould rather be spent on strategic projects. Similarly, inflexible\narchitecture cannot scale to meet changing requirements, so businesses pay for\nunused redundancy to cope with peaks in demand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even if businesses do have additional funds available, old\ntechnology reduces the scope for new deployments because of interoperability issues.\nAccording to Gartner, 80% of money spent on IT is ‘dead money’, used to ‘keep\nthe lights on’.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cloud adoption is not about massive cost savings, the whole\napproach to finance will need to change in order to succeed. If it doesn\u2019t, the\nmigration project is likely to fail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The pay-as-you-use cloud model changes IT spend from Capex to\nOpex. However, the switch to SaaS and PaaS will need to be closely monitored\nand controlled to prevent overspend. What\u2019s more, applications may need to be\nre-engineered to take full advantage of PaaS so that businesses don\u2019t consume\nbillable resources unnecessarily.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most companies simply do not fully understand their current\ninfrastructure, which is a significant problem when planning a migration to the\ncloud. They lack a detailed asset inventory for their data centre and do not\nhave easy oversight of hardware and software maintenance contracts which are\noften placed in limbo between IT and finance, with neither party wanting to\ntake responsibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No easy oversight of hardware and software maintenance contracts\nalso makes it harder to understand what you are paying for. As always, the\nanswer is to engineer systems that break these silos, giving teams the\noversight they need to better plan and manage operations – both onsite and in\nthe cloud. Without reviewing existing infrastructure, companies cannot start\nthe migration journey \u2013 or assess progress once they have begun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Data silos prevent most businesses from accurately assessing\nperformance – which makes forward planning an exercise in guesswork, not\nevidence-based decision-making. In many cases, real-time information simply\nisn\u2019t available or is incomplete.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This lack of oversight makes strategic decision-making almost\nimpossible in the age of disruptive computing and digital transformation.\nIncreasing real-time visibility will need to be a priority as you transition to\nthe cloud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Knowing IT assets is one thing but understanding how they are used\nis another. Businesses with failing cloud migration projects typically lack\nseveral key insights. In the same way that businesses lack insight into their\nexisting infrastructure, many have not fully understood how it is being used.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This means they are unable to align services to infrastructure,\nmap out service dependencies, or build an application and service roadmap to\nplan how cloud-based systems will affect or improve system usage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite massive improvements in data protection technologies, many\nbusinesses are still leaving themselves unprotected. For many companies, disaster\nrecovery plans are regarded as an insurance policy and are never tested or\nupdated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is compounded by a fear of change and an inability to reverse\nwhat they do if something goes wrong, and can lead to migrations being delayed,\ndown-scaled or even the cause of data loss. Testing DR plans and provisions is\nessential to establishing confidence, both in DR, and the ability to roll-back\nif required.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In most cases, data is understood in its primary context, such as\nCRM for sales and marketing, and finance for accounts. This singular view of\ndata exposes a lack of understanding about unstructured data and its potential.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Failure to address this approach limits the scope of cloud\nprojects, leads to missed opportunities, and fundamentally undermines system\ndesign which also increases the cost of re-architecting applications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Legislation, such as GDPR and PoPIA, along with industry\nregulations affects how data is used and stored in the cloud. Failure to\naccount for these factors can cause cloud projects to fail. Rules regarding\ndata storage and security are complex and easy to breach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Factors to consider when moving to the cloud are storing data in\ncompliant systems, and within the relevant national boundaries. Information\nmust be secured properly, with safeguards in place to limit sharing only with\npermitted partners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And don\u2019t forget, GDPR and PoPIA give individuals complete control\nover their data so systems need to enable that control. Massive fines means a\ndata breach is simply not an option, and this risk can seriously hamper any\ncloud migration project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

IT keeps systems running and finance pays the bills, but neither\ndepartment knows exactly what they are paying for. Is the business making\ndirect debit payments for licenses or contracts that are no longer required?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Without a deep understanding of financial insight, businesses\ncannot build a TCO. Companies need to be able to answer questions like ‘if we\ndon\u2019t renew, what happens?’ and ‘which resource does that payment refer to?\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lack of understanding of future maintenance liabilities is another\nchallenge. When considering cloud migration, many cost-benefit analysis\nexercises neglect to calculate the future cost of maintaining and supporting\nexisting on-site assets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

OEM maintenance contract costs can increase by 20% each year, or\nmore. And it\u2019s factors like this that are easily overlooked when performing a\ncost analysis. To succeed, businesses need to consider cloud migration projects\nin terms of the cost of not making the move to hosted infrastructure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The hardest part of any successful cloud migration is the planning\nand preparation that takes place before work starts. But, the rewards of a\ndiscovery stage to understand the current state of one’s infrastructure – and\nhow applications and services are used – can create a long-term impact.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

People are resistant to change, and this is the main reason why cloud migrations tend to fail. That is according to Bluegrass CEO Nick Durrant, who adds that business leaders must ensure their cloud strategy is aligned with their business goals, because a lack of vision from management and staff will have an enormous effect […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":28821,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4950,182,6,183,10675,13,262],"tags":[10052,1512,22,3462,376,445,1354,5696,6718,1514,1303,6559,441,10959,10545,8118],"class_list":["post-28820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-analysis","category-cloud","category-insights","category-software","category-thought-leadership","category-top-stories","category-used","tag-bluegrass","tag-capex","tag-cloud","tag-cloud-adoption","tag-gartner","tag-gdpr","tag-hardware","tag-nick-durrant","tag-oem","tag-opex","tag-paas","tag-popia","tag-saas","tag-silos","tag-software","tag-tco"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28820","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28820"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28820\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28965,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28820\/revisions\/28965"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}