If businesses are to make best of cloud and remain relevant in the digital era, they must learn to collaborate more effectively. However, an Oracle research report, “IaaS: building a business that innovates”, found many organisations operate in a way that is counter to effective collaboration.
The research looked at how companies in South Africa are approaching cloud computing and the organisational issues impacting their ability to effect significant business change and innovation.
It was clear there is a need for improved collaboration:
* 61% of respondents said lines of business and IT teams must collaborate for the enterprise cloud model to succeed.
* 34% said managing shadow IT (in which lines of business purchase technology unbeknownst to the IT department) is a significant barrier to adopting an integrated approach to the cloud.
* 46% said a lack of understanding by business departments of the need for integrated cloud resources is one of the current IT infrastructure challenges around cloud deployment.
While it’s clearly essential for businesses to change the way they work if they are to successfully innovate in the cloud, the technology itself also needs to be addressed: Oracle found the greatest areas of inefficiency in the current platform model being used by companies are the integration of used services (57%), time to deployment (55%) and poor application integration (53%) – all of which are detrimental to effective and rapid innovation.
In addition to managing shadow IT (34%), discord between infrastructures (32%), increased security risk (41%), increased cost (30%) and proving return on investment (37%) were cited as barriers to adopting an integrated approach to cloud that would allow for better collaboration.
Pascal Giraud, senior director: IaaS foundation and cloud platform at Oracle EMEA, says: “These issues can be blamed in part on infrastructure that has become too rigid, confused and complex. This has led to an unresponsive, disjointed organization where opportunity and innovation fall down the cracks between lines of business and badly integrated systems.
“By moving to Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), businesses can smooth over the cracks and create a truly collaborative organisation. It provides a common foundation for innovation and implementation, removing the limitations around resources and mitigating against silos.”
Understanding the complex balance between innovation and governance, Oracle has tuned its IaaS offerings to provide LOB developers access to fast-provisioning, high-performance resources, with the policy and cost controls that IT requires.
