The ‘Pingdemic’: How to avoid periods of downtime with cloud adoption.

With many retailers seeing absence rates of 30%, the significant gaps in workforces over the past couple of weeks have left organisations juddering to a stop- hospitality forced to close kitchens and HGV drivers unable to deliver basic groceries. Once again this is a pandemic issue affecting primarily front line workers- jobs that find it impossible to head online. However we are seeing a significant amount of companies struggling who quite frankly should know better by this point.

Whether there is hesitation around capacity numbers in the office, booking away days or booking flexible office space, the future of business models in most sectors seems unclear and is leading to what we’d describe as a cautious approach.

However, research from Gartner predicts that 85% of enterprises will adopt a cloud first approach to business by 2025, but there are still so many questions around how and why and when. Our clients time and again approach us with: How do we move process capability and data to the cloud and take advantage of the scale, automation and ultimately the business empowerment that it brings?  How do we plan, decide and mobilise a cloud adoption journey moving into the future?

Of course, the recent ‘pingdemic’ related issues are only the latest in a continual stream of red flags for businesses still operating through physical/paper processes. Other triggers that we are regularly witnessing include but are not limited to:

• A change in working model- hybrid, remote, furloughed working.
• Data Centre changes
• Increasing functionality/capability requirements that can’t be sourced from in-house or on-premise IT.
• Major suppliers or vendors migrating to the cloud and offering new “evergreen” capabilities
• Sourcing staff to maintain older technologies becoming less sustainable, more challenging and costly
• New, younger staff demanding the flexible accessibility of cloud first organisations

Whatever the trigger, organisations must understand what is driving their cloud adoption as part of their own internal PDCA/improvement strategy that will outline how any migration of business capability and data will impact the business.  IT Heads should be asking how their objectives align with wider business goals for a cloud adoption strategy to get the most out of your cloud adoption.

If you’ve been affected by the ‘Pingdemic’ and your workforce has been forced to sacrifice productivity because you are yet to implement a comprehensive cloud provision, why not give us a call? Perhaps this latest red flag is the nudge that many organisations will need to realise the cloud is where security is at in the future.