Agility means being able to change direction rapidly in response to a change in market conditions. As business increasingly moves to online and mobile interfaces, the agility of enterprise applications becomes a critical success factor. With the advent of the cloud, making applications agile means moving them away from the on-premise data center. Cloud-based applications are not automatically agile, however. The “lift and shift” approach to porting applications from on-premise data centers to cloud infrastructure can actually impede agility.
To make cloud-based applications agile, there has to be a commitment to platforms, tools, processes and people. Enterprise applications were created to serve business needs. As a result, business managers tend define agility in the following terms: How quickly one can get feedback from the end customer or customer-facing systems; how quickly one can decipher the feedback; how quickly one can decide what to do about it and implement the plan. To make this work, IT managers are moving applications to the cloud.