Evaluating IT decisions and creating governance structures
Evaluating a portfolio’s risk is complicated and requires the collaboration of multiple departments to create a governance body. This governance body needs to define individual project risks and overall portfolio risk that affect costs, timelines, and objectives (Erl, Mahmood, & Puttini, 2013). Unfortunately, an organization’s operational governance can be limited in these cloud infrastructures since the control is held in the power of the cloud provider. If an organization are not in control of some of these systems, then the SLA’s they guarantee to stakeholders are at jeopardy. Therefore, organizations must adapt their policies, and this requires a top-down understanding of the organization’s direction and flexibility. In most cases, this requires multi-regional compliance issues which requires the involvement of legal experts (Erl, Mahmood, & Puttini, 2013).
Migration Risks
A comprehensive study conducted at Georgia State University on a risk mitigation framework illustrated that one of the most important aspects of project performance was related to the cultural contingency theory (Maruping et al, 2019). This suggests that the cultural composition of the team is critical to defining and maintaining IT processes that can mitigate overall project risks. If an organization wants to manage a cloud project portfolio while minimizing risk, leaders and managers must be aware of the effect of the team’s culture on the overall ability to execute on implementing governance policies.
The number one risk for an organization is exposing its private company data to the cloud. The organization’s collected data is stored on physical hardware in another part of the world and not technically in the organization’s full control. Although cloud service providers utilize the best security practices, the consumer of these providers must utilize the best practices themselves to properly limit access to the databases. Data breaches are costly to settle. Latest research indicates that each record that is hacked, on average, costs the organization $150 (Brook, 2019). In the United States, the average annual cost for a company is roughly $8.19 million to settle these cases.
Aside from cost, there is significant risk that migrating a project portfolio to the cloud can decrease the quality of current business offerings to the market. An organization that has developed a globally used application that resides 100% on-premise might not want to migrate to the cloud, due to the risk decreasing customer satisfaction. However, as subsequent paragraphs will discuss, migrating these applications to the cloud might provide other benefits that can outweigh these risks – benefits such as increased scale, additional services, and flexibility making changes rapidly.
Methodologies employed when engaging clients on project portfolios
While cost was an initial reason for migrating to the cloud, IT leaders and managers are now more likely to view cloud migrations as a way to scale and support increasingly complex applications with the volume of big data (McKendrick, 2019). Most enterprise organizations are able to spend millions of dollars to ensure IT operations are not disrupted, so cost is not necessarily the biggest factor when deciding big changes. Instead, IT leaders want to ensure they remain competitive and agile in an evolving technology world. Therefore, when engaging clients on managing cloud project portfolios, cost is not the best way to initialize conversations. Instead, demonstrating the capabilities of provisioning servers within minutes, replicating data backups with a few clicks, or integrating machine learning and cognitive services to existing applications are more impressionable methods for increasing engagement.
However, not all industries are the same when it comes to managing project portfolios in the cloud. Government enterprise architectures face different challenges when managing Information Communication Technologies (Lnenicka & Komarkova, 2019). Examples of frameworks mentioned earlier in this paper do not currently exist for ICT due to the volume of data explosion and expectations to process, visualization, and digest public data. Cloud service providers, the government, and scholars are actively working together to define these processes and evolve the architectural components and relationships.
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