For some business practices, endurance and consistency are the name of the game. However, there comes a time when organizations need to examine what they’ve been doing and find opportunities to move faster to maintain a competitive edge. Cloud agility can help businesses that are looking for greater flexibility, scalability, and development efficiency, among other things. In this article, we’ll discuss cloud agility – what it is, why it’s important, and how to build agility in your organization.
What is Cloud Agility?
Cloud agility allows businesses to create, launch, and test their applications quickly in a cloud-based environment. When an organization is agile, it’s able to respond rapidly and effectively to new business challenges or changing technological environments. Agility is a key component of cloud computing and enables organizations to respond appropriately to user demands.
Why is Cloud Agility Important for Businesses?
Companies that remain stagnant run the risk of losing business over time to competitors that are offering products and services that customers have grown to want. Cloud agility is important for business because of what’s provided in a cloud environment.
Organizations are able to iterate and progress more quickly in a cloud environment, improving the chances of relevancy and profitability, than in a traditional on-premises environment.
Advantages of Achieving Cloud Agility
Achieving cloud agility comes with several business-friendly benefits, including speeding up the time to market, allowing for more flexibility, and adding value to the organization.
Faster Time-to-Market
The iterative nature of cloud computing gives businesses the chance to develop and launch an application and bring it to market, improving it over time. This cuts down on the delay between development and launch that may be present in an on-premises environment, where bringing something to market can require more lift from a business. Instead of taking weeks to procure and provision IT infrastructure, for example, cloud servers can accomplish this in minutes.
Automation
Automating routine tasks in a cloud environment can free up time on IT teams for other, more important tasks. Through automation, businesses are also able to reduce the number of errors from manual entry and oftentimes reduce the cost of labor associated with mundane, repetitive tasks, such as provisioning, scaling, and managing of resources.
Flexibility and Scalability
Whether it’s automated or not, businesses can easily scale their IT resources up or down to respond appropriately to demands. The flexibility of paying for what you use is not possible in an on-premises environment.
Elasticity
Cloud platforms offer elasticity, which means resources can be automatically adjusted to match demand. Businesses can put rules in place to trigger an increase or decrease that react to changes in demands on the system.
For example, if a website has an unexpected surge in traffic, the cloud infrastructure can automatically allocate more resources to handle the increased load to prevent the site from crashing.
Speedier Innovation
Cloud services offer access to various tools and technologies, like machine learning, big data analytics, and IoT platforms.This allows for innovation by letting organizations experiment with new technologies without substantial costs initially; it also accelerates their time-to-market and helps product improvements to be launched more quickly.
Pay-As-You-Go Model
Cloud services operate according to an OpEx model rather than CapEx. This pay-as-you-go or pay-per-use model, enables organizations to pay solely for the resources they utilize. This cost-efficient approach eliminates the necessity for substantial upfront investments in hardware and software, which gives IT leaders the opportunity to invest their former CapEx budget into other areas.
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