Are you able to measure Agility with Cloud?

Though cloud was propelled projecting the conversion of Capex model to Opex, the actual benefit of Cloud was with the introduction of agility that made the system more versatile. With agility, any enterprise can opt for services like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure’s IaaS console and build a virtual machine over there as per one’s needs. The latency and waiting period is over with agility coming in handy with quicker deployments and savings on operational costs.

However, though CoreIT finds agility to be a great value addition to Cloud it is impossible to measure. Agility can only be understood in terms of value that it adds to an existing platform and depends greatly on the type of business or industry. To make things a little easier, here are some tips on creating metrics for your own enterprise:

Emphasize on what components improves Cloud: For instance, in earlier times, it took months to create or build an application and then put it into production. But today an IaaS provider can fulfill those needs in a matter of hours. Therefore, it is best to understand the current stage of the enterprise and the desired stage it is supposed to be. This gives an idea about the transition and milestones by using agility which in turn can be measured with respect to time and resources.

Relationships between Cloud and non-Cloud systems: When traditional and Cloud based systems are coupled together, the limitations of the legacy system can actually hinder the progress in Cloud. Hence all the complex relationship areas of the legacy system and Cloud must be examined closely to ensure that an inventory or some sort of metrics is in place for measuring system performance.

From expert opinions and implementation experiences, CoreIT concludes that measuring agility is difficult and metrics are there only for the purpose of understanding the progress of a system. Sooner or later the metrics are bound to become less important as compared to the results of deployment.

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