Cloud:What’s Opportunity it brings for EA's?

How it’s have been?

Since long, most of the EA (Enterprise Architect) programs have always been in their own box with well-established practices for deliverables, standards, and architecture that have been developed around the characteristics of the core business. Trans-formative business agility can't be achieved when standards and practices takes time to change. This comes with out – of – box thinking.

How it’s changing?

Big 5 cloud service providers - Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Salesforce offers solutions which will help EA’s to create an impact with business leaders by being fast and agile with less operational cost.

Today business is more impatient and seeks independence to experiment with ideas at much faster pace. EA’s objective should be to balance risk and agility and not always act as guardrails, as too much control without innovation always pushes IT & its management out of the loop. Business values, more than hard-and-fast IT management rules, is becoming the predominant factor in finalizing decisions.

So enterprise architects should be business-focused, strategic, and pragmatic to become an integral part of business and technology planning processes.

How EA’s should contribute?

With rampant cloud adoption going all around - it will alter the role of enterprise architects from “owning the architecture”, strict governance, well-vetted standards and controlled release patterns to new way where they support business self-service way of delivering technology and serving as a cloud center of expertise.

There are a plethora of different cloud reference architectures. EA’s role would be to define the right reference architecture for the enterprise’s cloud approach. This will strengthen their engagement with technology management and business leaders.

With cloud computing services becoming members of the technology management portfolio, the challenge shifts from understanding cloud to selecting the right partners. Most hosting companies, managed service providers, and software companies are jumping into the cloud business. But are they really delivering the cloud computing values of agility, autonomy, scale, flexibility, and pay-per-use economics? EA’s of cloud era should be contributing by evaluating these options and then giving right direction to IT which eventually benefits business.