The Influence of Cloud Computing on Corporate Culture

By: | October 28th, 2020

how cloud computing works

Image by Wynn Pointaux from Pixabay

Cloud technologies slowly but surely conquer the business world. It’s not a surprise as Cloud offers more opportunities than traditional technologies starting with optimizing infrastructure expenses, increasing the reliability of your systems with distributed data storages, and easing scalability if you need more server capacities to cover your business needs.

The situation with COVID-19 contributed to the growth of demand in public and private Cloud solutions since many businesses launched their online presence, and those who were already online faced the need to grow their capacities. The Pandemic contributed to a 37% growth in Cloud expenses at the beginning of 2020 compared to the previous year.

Along with adjusting the IT services, Cloud fosters changes in the corporate culture. Here is only a small amount of such changes that will accompany the process of Cloud implementation in your company:

The increased role of leadership

Demonstrating leadership is critical. Once you make the decision to move to Cloud, connect with all key stakeholders to present the idea. This will help to ensure the same vision and proper prioritization. It may seem rather formal but when executives do not understand the importance, the process can get stuck due to insufficient people resources or blockers with budget allocation. There should be one or several idea proponents who would drive the progress. The same goes for highlighting all key benefits a company will receive from this initiative and translating this to your personnel to motivate them.

Rolling out changes in smaller iterations

It’s not new for teams practicing Scrum development, however, if you are in the process of Cloud migration, it’s better to perform it in several stages. That will help to ensure the system stability and will give your employees some time to adjust to the new workflow. If you plan to use both Private and Public Cloud, you can start by introducing the Private one to cover the internal needs first dividing it into smaller chunks. For instance, start from a Distributed file system, where your users can share remote folders in the Cloud environment, before moving to more global changes. The benefit of this approach is finding and fixing bugs right away to eliminate the risk of outages with new infrastructure once it’s fully in production.

difference between public cloud and private cloud

Image Source: Cloudflare

Organizing learning activities for your personnel

While almost everyone heard the term, not all people know how Cloud actually functions. The fear of the unknown may complicate the Cloud implementation and cause objections from your employees. It’s worth addressing all their concerns through organizing workshops and lectures as well as sharing the info on the progress through corporate emails. It will make the transition smoother and increase the success of your Cloud project. Also, take care of internal documentation related to the new processes, it will make employees’ lives much easier.

Fostering transparency

One of the benefits Cloud brings is reducing costs on infrastructure maintenance. It may create a negative vision that you plan stuff shortening starting from the IT department. But in fact, quite the opposite is true. Operating decentralized environments can be more difficult due to its complex nature, that’s why you may need to engage extra human resources to help your colleagues to adapt to these changes.

It’s important to be honest about the main reasons for Cloud implementation. If they are done due to growing capacities, it’s a good sign of business growth and can increase the morale of your stuff in these turbulent times. There might be another case if your current system is running on outdated infrastructure and there’s a risk of major outages. It’s also worth sharing this info so that people know your intentions and not inventing their own misleading reasons that can ruin the working relationship.

That being said, Cloud implementation is not only the new level in the development of your IT department or growing your personnel. It acts much deeper penetrating into the corporate culture transforming business structure from the inside.

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