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How Cloud Computing Can Foster Business Agility?
In today’s competitive market, business agility is a critical enabler for companies to maintain operations and acquire a competitive advantage. Business agility is all about fast responding to changing market conditions while staying ahead of the competition.
Traditional IT infrastructures struggle to deliver resources rapidly enough to accommodate new business initiatives. Cloud computing models are an excellent IT service option for overcoming IT resource constraints while promoting company agility and competitiveness.
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According to cloud service providers, adopting a cloud for companies will boost competitiveness and improve business outcomes by increasing agility. These promises are inspiring, but first, let us explore business agility from both a business and an IT perspective and how cloud models may promote business agility. To begin, business agility is defined as a term or concept that describes how firms handle their markets and operational changes regularly.
Business agility refers to an organization’s ability to respond swiftly to changing market conditions, seize opportunities quickly, quickly deploy new distribution channels at lower costs, and optimize revenues in the process.
Cloud computing models, according to CIOs, are perfect for achieving business agility within an organization, given the number of new technologies available. This is because cloud models allow for scalability (up and down), flexible per-user charges, and pay-per-resource billing, among other things. Cloud computing may help an organization become more agile by facilitating mobility, boosting internal communication through collaboration tools, and allowing real-time customer connections to drive business agility efforts.
The concept of agility is comparable to agile project management practices, which involve project teams analyzing their goals and project tasks being regularly assessed throughout the project life cycle, rather than evaluating outcomes and performance at the conclusion. Essentially, business agility is a systematic approach to change management that gives a company a framework for responding to change while also considering the demands of the entire organization. An agile company is resistant to change and capable of adapting to any change (internal or external) in a long-term way.
Cloud computing achieves agility through its elasticity and adaptability. IT resources can be deployed fast and scaled up or down in response to market demand. Businesses can develop new products or services and adjust to changing circumstances due to their flexibility. All cloud deployment models benefit from this flexibility and elasticity. Furthermore, because an external cloud services business handles the infrastructure, there is no requirement for internal IT training.
Cloud models support agility in some critical regions for business enterprises, they are:
Quickly adapt to changing business processes:
Existing business procedures are altered, or new ones are introduced in agility. This change in operations would necessitate the replacement or addition of IT resources. Cloud computing makes these transitions simple by allowing businesses to easily add or change IT resources to support their evolving processes.
Enables on-demand resources for development and testing:
Resources are required to support corporate processes and test and build new software. Obtaining new resources and integrating them into existing infrastructure can take time, causing significant delays in capitalizing on commercial opportunities. This can be a commercial risk because money is being spent on new expensive resources that must not become ineffective. These risks are eliminated by using a cloud model because resources are available on-demand, saving time. Furthermore, cloud models’ usage-based payment substitutes the original up-front cost of acquiring new resources within the company.
Optimizes IT budgets:
The pay-per-resource model enables businesses to deploy and test projects more quickly while saving money on new resources that must be bought and made available. This eliminates the need for IT capital expenditure budgeting and allows finance to assigning monthly fixed expenditures conveniently. Cloud models make it easy to control unanticipated IT expenses with minimal effort.
Focus more on IT strategies:
Clouds are adaptable and scalable, allowing for faster and more efficient corporate operations and transactions. Cloud applications are accessible over the internet, allowing businesses to access their data and engage in more productive client interactions. IT teams may focus more on building new effective apps and delivering business results because they don’t have to worry about managing infrastructure.
HBR Analytic Services performed a poll named “Business Agility in the Cloud” in June 2014 to demonstrate the link between cloud computing, business agility, and a more significant competitive advantage. Five hundred twenty-seven people from large and medium businesses took part in the Verizon poll. According to the findings, 71 % of respondents have utilized cloud computing to simplify business processes and IT management. 74% percent of cloud adopters say that transferring their company functions to the cloud has given them a competitive edge.
According to the Verizon survey, 32% of organizations that have utilized the cloud can achieve business agility in fast-changing and competitive marketplaces. This 32% of respondents say that cloud adoption has given their companies advantages in speed, simplification, and the ability to interact with people and data, all of which are critical facilitators of business agility. Cloud computing models are becoming conventional IT delivery platforms for organizations based on their benefits, advantages, and statistics.
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