Over the past 24 months, global businesses have encountered many uncertainties, from disrupted supply chains to government-led lockdowns and remote-working measures in workplaces. With many unknowns, the existing business models built for efficiency were put to the test, and the fragile nature of businesses exposed to the new reality. Enterprises were forced to digitally transform at scale to bring agility in operations and resiliency to their business systems to overcome these challenges.
Businesses need to build architectures that readily share data between business processes, analyze the data to derive insights, and build composable, modular systems that can respond and adapt to changes rapidly. This post-pandemic wave of digital transformation is meant to bring in more flexibility in enterprises and has been fueled by the cloud. With the advancement in cloud technology, companies today want rapid innovation, exploit new market opportunities, or deliver better experiences and scale efficiently with reduced technology risk.
But how do we make such systems a reality? Decision-making has to be autonomous and augmentative to realize change early. Technology platforms, on the other hand, have to be modular and plug-and-play in nature to personalize application experiences for the customer. This means enterprises have to look for services that offer preassembled business capabilities and deliver role-specific application experiences.
What are composable services?
As per Gartner, “composable business means creating an organization made from interchangeable building blocks. The modular setup enables a business to rearrange and reorient as needed depending on external (or internal) factors like a shift in customer values or sudden change in supply chain or materials.” [1]
The Gartner structure for a composable business is an organization-level construct that has implications for business strategy, vendor sourcing, technology/architecture decisions, and organizational models that redefine the relationship between business and IT.
A composable business delivers business outcomes through an assembly of packaged business capabilities. [2]
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To be future-ready, organizations need to have all components like customer journey, role-specific priorities, vertical domain plans, application experiences, cloud-native architectures, policy, and regulations in one place. In their cloud adoption journey, organizations should factor in composability and reusability to scale it across the organization and meet business objectives.
Once these building blocks are defined and available, it becomes easy for the organization to design modular systems with cloud and create services for evolving customer needs and mitigate any disruption, be it a pandemic or a regulatory change in the market.
Companies need to derive value from their cloud platforms by adopting them as a business-technology transformation. They need to invest in the business domains to increase revenue and better their margins. The business strategy and risk assessment should decide the technology selection process and the operating model developed around the cloud technology.
Cloud investment priorities can vary by domain. [3]
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Key steps to develop an effective cloud-optimized composable operating model:
- Implementing an agile way for application development, infrastructure, and security
- Leverage APIs and event streams to create application experiences that are intuitive and tailored to preferences
- Develop a software-defined approach to the cloud with infrastructure as code
- Embed reusability and composability with end-to-end automation
- Provision workloads on the cloud with dedicated as-a-service business platforms securely
The composable business will be custom-defined for individual organizations, based on the business model, competitive landscape, and operating markets. So, the company should start with defining its long-term vision, evaluate cloud infrastructure and application experiences, and decide the business capabilities it needs from its composable organization.
Composability is key to the success of cloud-related strategies in today’s changing business environment. This will enable organizations to have a unified view of the application experience, infrastructure stack, and security needs of the technology systems. More important, it will be pivotal in building the foundational structure for the IT organizations of the future meant to deliver intended business success.
Source:
Accelerate digital transformations through cloud platforms
