Organizations across the globe have been working hard to improve their agility and scalability. Because of a dramatic shift in the business landscape caused by COVID-19, business leaders suddenly found themselves forced to step up to the challenge. The results are staggering-the sudden impact and pace of COVID-19’s global spread of caught off guard business. Many have struggled to react rapidly to changing circumstances because they have not been well-equipped to scale down impacted operations and resources in response to consumer demand being halted. Some were simply unwilling to operate their businesses 100 percent remotely and for that they require Elasticity in Organizations.
On the other hand, in sectors such as healthcare and other essential services, several organizations were unable to keep up with the unexpected increase in demand because they lacked the means to expand their operations rapidly. Most of those companies that couldn’t adapt to changing circumstances had missing one or all of the three critical features of the modern business ecosystem – agility, elasticity, or mobility.
Below are a few points where companies can make their infrastructure agile and scalable and support sustainability and how these attributes can enable organizations, in the long run, to scale up their market.
The Role of Elastic Services in Agility within Business
In today’s world, companies face a variety of challenges that require them to adapt resources quickly to address a dynamically changing environment. After the pandemic statement, companies found themselves in a matter of hours trying to provide new remote-work solutions. Monolithic application architectures are designed to fit a specific capacity level. Due to the entire workforce requiring on-premise VPN connectivity, sudden changes in demand add stress to existing resources, such as an increase in network utilization.
Adaptation of Elastic Services to Real Demand
In other cases, there is a need for agility to pivot and re-invest resources away from impact operations or demand loss. An organization may consume elastic services and managed services to deploy the minimum resources necessary to serve actual demand. Managed service providers may support business units in crisis with stable, recurring resources at fixed annual rates, allowing leaders to re-prioritize full-time staff to new product lines or more strategic initiatives. A well-positioned product organization with an adequately designed Cloud-Native Architecture can auto-scale with the minimum resources required to run an application and scale out to meet a growth spurt’s demands.
Flexible, Collaborative and Secure Digital Spaces Allow Mobility for Enterprises
Besides agility and elasticity, enterprise mobility is the third crucial element that came to the spotlight during the recent crisis. IT leaders have previously opted to use digital workspaces as a versatile opportunity to improve in-person tasks with remote capabilities, such as daily homework. However, it was not until the current coronavirus crisis that many organizations viewed full-scale mobility of enterprises as highly differentiating, if not mission-critical to success.
However, full-scale mobility of enterprises is not a switch one can just flip. It needs changes in technology, culture, and behavior. The workforce, particularly employees of the new generation, prefers to work from home and operate more on performance, rather than “working a shift.” Managed service providers can help companies design a flexible remote setup, which can be further leveraged to drive a collaborative culture.
How to Implement Elasticity in Organizations : The Approach in Three Stages
There is no one-size-fits-all program to ensure the prosperous implementation of elastic services and to ensure elasticity, agility, and mobility in an enterprise ecosystem, given the different business requirements. However, following the three-step process described below, organizations are helping to devise a custom implementation plan tailored to their needs.
Step 1- Discover: Identify the business goals that the organization is trying to achieve through the implementation of these services and the potential risks that can put the effort at risk.
Step 2- Analyze: Analyze the business objectives and map them to the desired results. Evaluate capabilities against existing infrastructure– mapping demand vs. use trends and finding potential for industrialization.
Step 3- Plan: Define the roadmap for implementation. Enterprises can choose the buy, build, or partner way to implement and systematize a modern enterprise ecosystem.
Elasticity in Organizations Make Companies Risk-Tolerant and Sustainable
Establishing modern infrastructure and developing it at an enterprise level is a demanding task, especially during this crisis. However, companies should not look at this exercise to combat only the current crisis. An agile, elastic, and interactive business environment lets businesses address new projects with less concern. Friendly, flexible services for consumption will allow organizations to pay-as-you-go with minimal upfront investment costs. This ability will enable organizations that can mobilize a competitive edge in experimenting with new initiatives or expanding to new markets with high agility. It will also have a risk-managed self-scaling architecture that turns resources down to what is minimally needed to keep a foot in the game. Most importantly, it becomes more attainable and less regrettable to choose to fail quickly and stop investing.
