Yesterday’s Enterprise Architecture is no longer enough for competitive digital businesses. Digital transformation enabled by cloud technology has emphatically disrupted what our profession does—or, at least, what we’ve spent the past decade thinking it did—and requires us to again explore and adopt new methodologies and tools to manage IT.
Enterprise Architecture (EA) functions to assist enterprises in building structural foundations to match proposed business strategies. It captures the vision of an enterprise by integrating its dimensions to contextualize transformation strategies, organizational structures, business capabilities, data pools, IT applications, and all technology objects. Every business unit of an enterprise is subject to change, and each change may have significant consequences throughout organizational domains.
An enterprise that wants to adopt the cloud across all the business units must have a mature and well-formed understanding of its Enterprise Architecture and a clear view of components therein.
Packing your bags the right way
At a glance:
The quest of an enterprise for efficiency, cost consolidation and exploration of new sources of revenue is not something new. This quest pushes enterprises to routinely come up with newer and more efficient ways of doing business to remain ahead of the competition curve.
Cloud Transformation (moving IT infrastructure to the cloud) is one of those contemporary endeavours.
A four-phase approach to migrating to the cloud
IT professionals the world over crave simplicity and order when migrating enterprise applications to Microsoft Azure. Just as the business and technological benefits of a successful cloud transfer are clear (agility, cost, assurance, etc.), so too are the perils of a mismanaged move (impaired scalability, loss of data, business interruption, etc.).
Azure is Microsoft's cloud computing platform used for building, deploying, and managing applications and services via a global network of Microsoft data centres. It includes an ever-growing collection of integrated services related to analytics, databases, identity, and storage management.
A four-phase approach to an Azure migration that takes into account any and all application data handling requirements, security, and compliance variables is the following:
...and how traditional IT must change its behaviour
You already know this, but Cloud Technology has kind of changed the business world—not just the lives of IT professionals.
Cloud-enablement, and the proliferation of SaaS systems, has advanced to a point where start-ups can harness enough capacity from leased technology to challenge industry titans without actually needing a staff of IT support engineers.
