Part of KPMG's series COVID-19: Insights for CIOs and IT executives on considerations for building IT and business resilience in challenging times
The road through recovery and emergence into the new reality is rewriting the world as we know it. Our relationships to global institutions—political, consumer, capital markets, religious, education, and social—are all undergoing tremendous upheaval. And while different industries and markets will follow different paths and speeds into this uncharted future, all will exist in a much more digitally connected world.
In this video KPMG explores how the digital backbone of that connected world—cloud, network, and modern IT infrastructure components—underpin your ability to navigate this change. The shift to cloud-native and public cloud has radically accelerated, and with that growth in mind, we provide some insights that you might want to consider as we move forward.
Video companion text
How CIOs can optimize the cloud and hybrid infrastructure
Barry Brunsman
Principal, CIO Advisory, KPMG in the U.S.
The post-COVID-19 pandemic world will be a new reality focused on much more digitally connected components. For example, cloud, network and modern IT infrastructure will enable enterprises to navigate the new reality of all of the changes. As we look ahead, we’ll provide some insights that you may want to consider as you begin to make the shift to cloud-native and public cloud.
All things remote
With millions working remotely, it has caused major strains on the infrastructure of businesses, whether that be, residential, commercial or municipal. Both employees and consumers expect higher bandwidths, better solutions and have lower tolerances for performance issues and outages. For example, the increased demand for 5G PCs should be anticipated and expected now not five years from now. The same goes for any mobile devices, re-imagined remote workplace setups, integrated SaaS collaboration tools as well as highly secure PaaS solutions. If you carefully and purposefully embed these solutions into your operating model and roadmap now, it will undoubtedly pay off in the immediate future.
Optimizing cost while delivering on the new reality
Many companies are actively managing cash flow and expenses just to survive. Instead of investing in upgrading older infrastructure and data centers, look to conserve capital and make the move to the cloud to satisfy near-term demand for digital services. For many organizations, optimizing and right-sizing infrastructure capacity and spend is critical. We recommend some immediate levers to pull, such as: review and upgrade virtual machines, shutdown and right-size unused or under-utilized compute instances, move to containers, move to PaaS and move to optimal pricing model for workloads, for examples.
Resiliency in the hybrid, multi-cloud
Being agile in a pandemic is not enough, you also need to be resilient and able to make well-informed, risk-based decisions for the betterment of the enterprise. Where possible, it’s critical to disperse risk, increase work-load relevancy, and gain flexibility. It’s also important to consider diversifying the single provider model and shift to a multi-cloud option. Be sure to factor in the cost of re-engineering and/or re-architecting if you choose to move to a new environment and what risks you might need to account for.
There is no doubt that cloud and modern infrastructure solutions will be an essential part of a path forward towards a new reality. Take this time to examine your entire strategy and ask yourself the following questions:
- Are your cloud and network strategies delivering the speed and flexibility you require?
- Is your environment enabling the secure, connected and seamless experience your users demand?
- Is your architecture built to take advantage of a much broader digital ecosystem within the next year?
- How confident are you that you have optimized the spend on your current infrastructure environment?
