I have been with AWS for 5 years and currently is a part of helping marquee customers across industries modernize and migrate large tracts of their IT estate and key applications including ERPs like SAP, core insurance, loan management and loan origination.
There are two big reasons encouraging enterprise customers to move to cloud. Firstly, business continuity in the face of disasters that we have not seen before. Customers who thought they were well prepared for disasters realized they were not so prepared after all, as people could not get to the data centers, and as lockdowns extended to multiple states, they couldn’t access their disaster recovery sites either. Key people falling ill also exposed the lack of automation that was essential in such times.
Secondly, with customers not keen to do physical meetings, transactions had to move to fully digital or at least “phygital”, which required reconfiguring customer journeys on the fly, rethinking rules engines and forecasting tools that had not been built for such drastic and unprecedented events, and even rethinking KPIs.
We have seen organizations that benefited from moving to the cloud measure the impact on multiple dimensions. One, whether the business priorities and metrics that were the original drivers have been met. Two, whether IT specific metrics like uptime and resilience, performance at scale, improved security posture etc., have been met. Three, whether the company is able to attract and retain the best talent. Four, whether a data driven culture of decision making has been established. Documenting the baseline, having a clear vision of what good looks like, establishing reliable measurement mechanisms, and having a strong governance are critical to ensure success.
