Market View 02

Jozsef Szegedi

Chief Technology Officer, Hungary

Market View 02

Jozsef Szegedi

Chief Technology Officer, Hungary

Writing a good strategy and a timeline is critical for businesses that want to adopt cloud technology.

Why has enterprise business been slow to adopt cloud technology?

Everybody is talking about the cloud right now, and even big companies have recognised the value that moving to the cloud can bring. But it is not always straightforward to adopt a cloud approach. First, writing a good strategy and a timeline is critical for businesses that want to adopt cloud technology. From here, businesses need to assess if they are cloud ready before they can start thinking about cloud implementation. For example, you would be surprised at how many businesses still run successfully using on-premise solutions and legacy software. Before they can move to the cloud, they have to make sure that their business will still run efficiently using the latest software versions. Alongside this technical change, there is also a mindset and governance transformation that needs to take place before deploying cloud solutions. Senior management needs to embrace the benefits of cloud and communicate this across the business, upskilling their existing team to manage cloud solutions or making new hires if required.

What makes a good cloud strategy?

Writing a good cloud strategy starts with understanding your current capabilities and assets. You would be amazed how many companies don’t have a realistic overview of their current setup! Different business areas within the company may have been allowed to develop their own pilot applications, but without good processes around them. So the first thing the business should do is compile a comprehensive list of applications and tools within the organisation and assess which ones are still required, and of those that are required assess whether they are cloud ready. This then allows the business to create a cloud roadmap and prioritise the order in which applications are moved to the cloud, working with vendors and internal stakeholders as required. From here, the priority should be identifying a future technology roadmap in collaboration with each department in the business. There’s no point deploying a new cloud solution if it can’t handle near-future requirements.

There’s no point deploying a new cloud solution if it can’t handle near-future requirements.

A CTO also needs to have strong personal skills and act as a bridge between the C-Suite of their business and the IT department.

Is a successful CTO defined by their strong technical skills?

Alongside having strong technical skills, a CTO also needs to have strong personal skills and act as a bridge between the C-Suite of their business and the IT department. Both groups have their own sets of acronyms and priorities, but they rarely align in modern business practices. So the CTO has to play a translator role to ensure there is total clarity shared across the business. Typically, the C-Suite will often identify a problem and actively seek a solution for this problem. But they won’t communicate this in a way that makes sense to their IT colleagues, hence the role of CTO as translator. When this translation takes place successfully, it allows IT teams to identify and deploy the right technology to solve the problem far quicker.

Alongside this, a great CTO is curious and encourages their team to be curious too. Remaining curious is critical for keeping up with the latest developments and technology, whether they are related to the cloud or something else. Many people are afraid of change, but we cannot hide from the fact that the world is changing. Change is a good thing and will always happen. We should embrace it and use curiosity to adopt it into our working lives.

SoftwareOne is redefining how companies build, buy and manage everything in the cloud. By helping customers migrate and modernise their workloads and applications, whilst navigating and optimising software and cloud change, SoftwareOne unlocks the value of technology for their clients.