Agility is indeed the holy grail of IT practices today. Companies want infrastructure to be flexible and scalable, and there is an urgent need for deploying mobile ERP. However, the shift from your existing workflows to agile ones needs to be made after careful planning and assessment of your technological needs.
Here are the steps you need to go through if you are contemplating of adopting the agile infrastructure model:
- Coincide with lifecycle points: One good strategy to make a clean break from the existing infrastructure is to time the lifecycle events. This means if some component of your system is coming to an end of its lifecycle soon, it is the best time to move it to the cloud with minimum ripple effect.
- Rethink data management: Not all the enterprise data should be moved to the cloud, because the service providers ultimately charge on a per unit basis. You can save much on the network and storage costs by keeping non-critical and archival data on your existing networks only.
- Choosing a deployment: Make sure that you have thought through the option to choose from a public, private or hybrid cloud. While private cloud gives unparalleled security and privacy, the maintenance and running costs would be quite considerable.
- Better governance: Agile infrastructures do not lend themselves easily to governance, as managing the different service modules individually can be difficult. That’s why as you go agile, it’s time to develop and put a strong governance policy in place.
Agile infrastructures need careful estimation, migration, security and governance plans if they are to succeed.
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