Optimizing cost and agility: 3 cloud-enabled actions for fluid, future-proof operations

The need to increase organizational 'agility' has been preached about for years… but a new sense of perspective on it, changing motives for it, and the maturity of solutions to make it real have all shifted the landscape dramatically. Being 'agile' - that is the ability to rapidly flex, change, and continuously evolve from a financial and operational standpoint - has never been more important. It represents the future of how business services should be delivered and is a key part of what we at Fujitsu call becoming an 'adaptive organization', whereby agility underpins operational effectiveness, speed to market, ability to deliver new insight, and customer and societal value. This adaptive future is a key priority for most C-suite leaders* - and it should be for you.

The cloud is a key part of building that agility. Hybrid- or multi-cloud architectures provide the flexibility, speed, security, and resilience you need to fuel your journey to becoming an adaptive organization.

* Mark Wheatley, How adaptability skills can help to tackle novel problems, EY, July 2021

As a technology consultant, I am very familiar with organizations seeing their IT estates as an area to drive cost out quickly. And with the help of the cloud it can be done. The $20k per month Emerald Performance Materials managed to save, through migration with us, is just one example.

Every organization's perspective changed during the pandemic, with 71% of leaders admitting they were unable to keep up with external change during this time. Of course, the need to simultaneously meet market needs faster while changing delivery models and reducing costs, will have undoubtedly put pressure on you to do ‘more with less’.

For this reason, we’re helping customer continuously optimize both cost and agility in the cloud to future-proof the business for sustainable success. This might involve extending practices adopted during the Covid-19 period or re-setting the direction altogether. Either way, the overall outcome is being able to save, scale, and serve better. We see three initiatives as crucial to making this happen, which I'll now take you through:

1. 1. Accelerating cloud correctly: right goals, right approach
2. 2. Removing the technical debt 'ball and chain'
3. 3. Continuous optimization for constant progress

So how do you address it? Most organizations struggle, with our research showing that around half of IT leaders saying that it's too complex a landscape to even attempt to tackle.

Legacy components have interdependencies on a myriad of things that are critical to major aspects of service delivery. Pursuing quick tactical gains in isolation, rather than as part of a well-defined modernization strategy, could easily put your organization at risk in terms of downtime, accumulated cost and a more complex profile of technical debt in the long-term.