Six reasons why better CX should be part of any cloud adoption business case?
As you might imagine, organizations are at different phases of their cloud journey; some don’t have yet their business case, while others have a mature cloud operating model, and they are looking into how to take advantage of new paradigms such as serverless computing,etc….
The idea of consuming IT resources (i.e., computing, storage, databases, etc…) as utility is often compared to the use of electricity or water (i.e., no need to set up infrastructure for that, and you just pay for what you use), and organizations have various drivers when moving to the cloud.
Cloud adoption reasons may include cost reduction, lowering IT projects risks, etc…..
However better CX (Customer experience) is not always mentioned explicitly in the cloud adoption business case, even if cloud computing can help removing many customer pain-points. Below are 6 reasons why that should change.
Reason #1: Cloud computing can increase business resilience
Do not judge me by my successes, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.Nelson Mandela
Post-pandemic time will require to think about individual resilience as well as business resilience.
Werner Vogels who is AWS CTO said that “Everything fails, all the time “; and we know that most of today’s business models rely heavily on IT solutions. So, the question may be how they got up again? What happens when there is a hardware failure, business activities should stop? Can cloud computing help to have cheaper fault-tolerant systems?
While 5 nines SLA ( i.e. 99 , 999 % ) may not be practically achievable , and not all systems have “high availability” requirements ; customers still have high expectations, and cloud natives solutions can be easily set up to be more resilient.
With the cloud, software defined infrastructures are being used, and there is no need for organizations (i.e. cloud consumers) to worry anymore about hardware failures. Also, have a cloud workload deployed in more than one availability zone (or even in different regions) and implement a failover mechanism is easier, and can be cost-effective. In addition to that, depending on RPO/RTO (Recovery Point Objective/Recovery Time Objective) requirements, there are multiple cost-effective disaster recovery options.
In past, the cost of implementing an efficient disaster recovery solution was very high, and it makes actionable BCP(Business Continuity Plan) a luxury for many organizations. With cloud, that time is over.
Better CX requires reliable and scalable IT solutions that are available whenever needed; and the cloud provides many cost-effective options to remove single points of failure by implementing decoupled architectures.
Reason #2: With cloud computing , resources can be closer to customers/end-users
You may delay, but time will not.Benjamin Franklin.
Since last 15 years, web applications are part of everyone’s life, and no customer likes server errors such as 503, 504 or any other HTTP errors.
Also, day or night, customers expect high responsiveness when using any IT systems, and no delay is acceptable. So, when it is cost-effective, it may make sense to take advantage of the cloud to increase uptime and have more responsive solutions.
Using the cloud, computing operations and resources can be brought closer to end-users, and many latency issues may be the problem of the past.
Main CSPs such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and GCP (Google Cloud Platform) have over 100 of edge locations and/or POP (Points of Presence) across the world, and they can be leveraged for better CX.
Depending on industry, those POPs will help to boost UX (User Experience), and increased UX contribute to a better CX because when customers have great interaction with all your products/services, it is a good achievement for overall CX improvement.
Of course, there will be some specific business user cases that will be better addressed with other edge computing tactics, but the cloud will still be immensely helpful.
Reason # 3: With cloud computing, IT support teams will have more tools to push service to next level
A successful tool is the one used to do something undreamed by his author. S.C. Johnson
Based on its specific mission, each organization can re-invent how it uses cloud resources, and IT teams can act as an internal trusted adviser and a broker of cloud services.
A PPT (i.e., People-Process-Technology) approach is a must for any service improvement and giving IT teams the best tools may metamorphose how services are delivered.
Cloud computing allows more observability, and IT teams can use telemetry data (logs, traces, metrics) proactively for increased UX.
Use of concepts such as AIOps for anomalies detection can help IT teams to prevent many incidents that otherwise would have impact to end-users needs.
The Egg/chicken dilemma may arise, but the cloud adoption goes hand in hand with new agile and DevSecOps practices, and those are foundational building blocks for improved product management in digital era.
On other side, cloud computing empowers companies with a lot of self-serve features, so staff can concentrate their efforts to high value activities that directly improve CX.
Also, with the cloud, depending on service model (i.e. IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS), a lot of burden is removed from organizations , and they can focus on their core mission .
We can mention as well that the cloud provides so many orchestration capabilities including options to provision resources or create complete IT environments within minutes using automation scripts (i.e. AWS CloudFormation, Azure ARM templates, Terraform , etc…..) , and that can help IT teams to deliver excellence.
Reason # 4: Cloud adoption means quick innovation
It always seems impossible until it’s done.Nelson Mandela
Moving to the cloud can help many small organizations to be more innovative and perform R&D activities that used to be impossible for them due to their size.
Better CX requires innovation, and capability to innovate quickly is a key building block for any organization that wants to deliver better products and services.
Considering that whatever the industry, it is hard to remove IT from innovation equation, we can say that cloud computing brings missing link to the innovation in small organizations.
Five cloud characteristics (i.e., on-demand self-service, broad network access, resources pooling, elasticity, and measured services) identified by NIST help to understand how cloud computing provide limitless innovation possibilities to organizations.
With the cloud, cutting edge technologies such as AI/ML (Artificial intelligence/ Machine Learning), AR/VR (Augmented Reality / Virtual Reality) , IoT ( Internet of Things) , Blockchain, etc…. are available to any organization without big initial investment. For example, within few days (or few weeks), small organizations can set up chatbots and they can leverage efficiently IoT devices in their operations.
In pre-cloud era, often large capital amounts were required before starting any IT project, but now there is no need to have up-front investment in IT infrastructure, etc.…..
Also, cloud shorten benefits realization cycle because IT systems needed to support benefits realization can be implemented quickly.
Reason #5: Cloud computing comes with more analytics features
Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.Albert Einstein
Analytics capabilities can make the difference for any organization, and it is critical to get right information from data.
For any business process, you cannot improve what you cannot measure; improvement requires great understanding of what is measured and getting expected insights from all data that is generated may be a challenge.
On CX perspective, there is also a need to capture different data about customers activities and try to extract meaningful information from it.
Microsoft describes 5 types of analytics (i.e., descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, prescriptive, and cognitive); and even if some organizations may focus on descriptive analytics activities, it is sure that using cloud solutions will help them.
Reason # 6: Cloud computing resources are more secure, and compliance is simplified
Most people are starting to realize that there are only two types of companies in the world: those that have been breached and know it, and those that have been breached and don’t know it. Therefore, prevention is not sufficient, and you are going to have to invest in detection because you are going to want to know what system has been breached as fast as humanly possible so that you can contain and remediate.Ted Schlein
Cloud is secure by design, and it comes with many cost-effective detection tools.
Stephane Nappo who is the co-author of “Ten Commandments for a Cyber Resilience strategy “said once that “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and few minutes of cyber-incident to ruin it” , and I would agree with him.
There will be no satisfying CX if personal identifiable information is not well protected, and cloud computing can help.
First of all, cloud have so much built-in security features, there is no need to re-invent the wheel, and whenever required data-at-rest or data-in-transit can be easily encrypted.
Secondly, based on organization policy , when needed cryptographic keys used to encrypt data saved in cloud can be stored on-premises.
Depending on industry, there are different compliance requirements, and most of time CSP (Cloud Service Provider) third-part certifications will allow to meet them.
Finally, it makes sense to say that security controls to meet CIA (Confidentiality — Integrity — Availability) requirements can be implemented quickly for cloud solutions because shared responsibility model makes it simpler for cloud consumers ( i.e. organizations using cloud services).
Key takeaways
To conclude, in VUCA (Volatile — Uncertain — Complex — Ambiguous) world, better CX is not optional, it is a must. To achieve that, cloud adoption will help organizations to be more resilient on business perspective; and capabilities that used to be exclusively available to big companies; now , they are available to small organizations, and SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprise) as well.
Prediction is that in future , more organizations will be trying to find cost-effective solutions to increase CX, and cloud computing can help in so many different ways.
We must recognize that cloud adoption may introduce some new risks, but generally hybrid and multi-cloud strategies may allow to mitigate most of them including issues related to potential lock-in problems, and proactively having a clear exit strategy will help as well.
Of course, on long-run, targeting having cloud native applications and using “deployment” friendly approaches (following “write once , deploy anywhere” principle ) such as containerization may add the value to the broader cloud program ; but when putting together the initial business case for cloud adoption or application modernization initiatives, just thinking about CX may help a lot .
Once organizations have their business case ready, then they can start their next phase of cloud journey that may include classic 6Rs (i.e. Rehost aka “lift & shift “, Replatform , Repurchase, Refactor , Retire , and Retain) migration strategies.
