Consuming Cloud: A Director’s Guide

Security worries, lack of transparency and poor control are common perceptions and real obstacles to achieving the business acceleration that only cloud IT can bring. It all stems from the complexities that grow as businesses increase their cloud consumption. We believe that these problems are eminently solvable by the introduction of orchestration. Once in place you can turn your IT department into a strategic advantage.

Here are Ospero’s seven reasons why your business needs cloud orchestration.

1) Your rewards from cloud aren’t outweighing your risks
Cloud is great in theory and you know it makes sense, but for many the reality proves painful to implement and costly to maintain. So how do you reduce the management and implementation burdens and costs on your already overstretched IT department?
Orchestration is the framework that can provide this dynamic and agile resource by stitching together the fabric of all your environments to create a seamless infrastructure. This is achieved whilst still maintaining, and in many cases vastly improving, the security and governance of your infrastructure that is required in today’s modern operating environment.
When in place, the IT department will be able to meet the need for a flexible and powerful infrastructure. One that can be controlled and managed by the business to align quickly to changing goals and demands but one which is fully secure and integrated into the corporate environment.

2) Security and compliance are expensive and patchy
Moving to cloud means a catalogue of added security concerns for the business manager. Or does it? Cloud orchestration fundamentally reduces risks every step of the way, and removes these security burdens. Stop worrying about legacy technology or having to plug unreliability gaps. Get control and enforce business policy and governance in a simple, consistent and efficient way.

3) You don’t know what cloud services you’re using
The average enterprise is running 400+ applications that it doesn’t know about! Cloud services have made it really easy to buy and implement siloed business software. In fact it’s too easy. Within many organisations the eagerness to solve business problems quickly by side stepping IT and its perceived bottlenecks has allowed business silos to run ‘stealth’ IT assets to meet tactical needs. Only orchestration brings the necessary clarity and control to make cloud a game-changing business enabler and provide an easily accessible infrastructure to the people who really need it.
Getting IT the easy way shouldn’t mean the plan goes out of the window; and the business is left unable to measure, manage, control, secure or coherently integrate it to meet a strategic purpose. That’s where cloud orchestration comes in.

4) Your IT wasn’t designed for your unique business needs
90% of enterprises now have some sort of cloud implementation, but there’s no one-size fits-all when it comes to cloud. Cloud orchestration ensures you get what’s best for what your business needs.
Without orchestration, the constant change and inherent inconsistencies between different services providers and their offerings can reduce cloud evaluation and procurement into little more than guesswork. You shouldn’t continue your cloud journey without fixing that first.

5) The IT function is unable to innovate
Operations complexity and duplicated processes across cloud services suck IT teams dry and leave little time to drive strategic innovations with genuine business value. Orchestration can turn IT into an internal services provider and strategic partner of the business. Innovate significantly more on the same or reduced budget.

6) Competitors are improving service delivery and decreasing time to market
You really get to appreciate the value of business agility when you’re being slowed down by technology. With cloud orchestration you will improve competitive advantage through reduced time to market. Internal development teams can focus all their effort on output rather than their infrastructure, all within a control framework that ensures best practices and governance are followed.
While some businesses are still figuring out how to support core business functions through cloud computing, others are leaping ahead with genuinely innovative ways of improving service delivery and doing a better job of satisfying and monetising customers and partners. Get to the front of the race and stay there with cloud orchestration.

7) You believe that it needn’t be this complicated (and you’re right!)
You’ve bought into the cloud proposition and recognise the business benefits – but it’s proving hard to generate an ROI and even harder to maximise it. If only you could consume service without complexity, provision with precision and deploy on demand.
Ospero, with its powerful and highly agile tools, provides the ideal way for a business to stay in control of its IT and produce an environment that can be adapted to meet the many demands of today’s tough business environment.
The era where the CIOs are the controllers of everything technological is coming to an end. But that shouldn’t mean a future based on stealth computing, where business units and the IT department exist in a state of war and transactions are carried out using insecure and unreliable technology.