Optimizing Architecture and Business Processes

Driving improvements across the board

In addition to reducing resource waste and cost overruns, an overarching, perpetual cloud optimization strategy can help enterprises of all sizes improve performance, processes, and outcomes by:

Trimming technical debt: Optimizing cloud architecture allows organizations to pay down or eliminate their technical debt—the products, processes, and systems that stifle innovation. Porting to newer cloud platforms frees companies to retire their aging legacy platforms, data centers, and hardware, and apply the saved maintenance hours to the pursuit of novel solutions.

Accelerating development: Speed is one of the cloud’s biggest benefits. As an example, non-IT team members can launch new features easily with low-code/no-code platforms and potentially reduce development time from weeks to just hours. Opportunities abound to move into an even higher gear by incorporating automation into app development environments and other instances that would remove the delays associated with human involvement. Moreover, optimization can help make engineers and DevOps teams more productive by delineating which procedures are their responsibility and which, like platform updates, belong to the cloud provider.

Setting and enforcing boundaries: Unlike more centralized IT environments and platforms, the cloud introduces greater potential for rogue behavior and undisciplined usage. That’s why cloud governance is so vital—as is the optimization process that ensures the guidelines cover the right ground and everyone follows them. Typically, cloud governance includes policies and controls for:

Data classification and storage—understanding what assets an organization has and where they are stored
Identity and access management—determining who has access to what data, apps, and services
Spending—setting limits around cloud purchases based on use cases
Security—mitigating risks by establishing and enforcing compliant resource and data usage

⁵ Software AG Situation Report 2022