Madison Group’s journey to the cloud

Since its inception ten years ago, cloud computing has expanded and evolved into one of the biggest paradigm shifts in the computer age said Stanley Chege, CIO Madison Group, a leading financial services industry provider.

While making a case-study presentation of Madison Group’s journey to the cloud, during the recent Cloud and Security Summit in Kigali, Rwanda themed: Protecting the Digital Space, Chege asserted that cloud computing is part of Madison Group’s growth strategy.

He noted that unlike before, instead of an entity requiring millions of dollars of upfront capital investment and up to a year of time to provision a data centre, it is now possible to do the equivalent with a credit card and a few mouse clicks in less than a minute.

The summit was intended to sustain the momentum of the world that has steadily risen to cloud computing while tapping several public institutions and enterprises which are on the course towards investing on it.

Immediate access

Once a steep barrier to entry, now any organisation, regardless of size from a single individual to a global, multi-billion-dollar enterprise has virtually immediate access to all the computing capacity it needs, on demand.

Almost all the digital disruption that is occurring today has some form of cloud computing at its core. The availability of very low-cost, on-demand, and easily provisioned Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) has all but rendered obsolete the need for many organisations to build and operate their own data centres.

The growing portfolio of application Software as a Service (SaaS) has enabled business organisations to directly procure solutions with little or no assistance from IT, eliminating the need for upfront capital and reducing the lag time from decision to value from months or years to weeks or days.

Group IT Strategy

As for Madison Group, which is comprised of three subsidiaries namely, Madison Life Business, Madison General Business and Madison Assets, getting to cloud called for the required the group IT strategy to deploy a roll-out initiative for the next three years.

“Our main driving force is the digital transformation,” said Chege adding: “The DX initiatives are enabled by the disruptive technologies of social media, mobility, analytics and cloud computing (SMAC).”

The digital transformation initiatives enable organisations to become digital businesses. Chege noted the business driver for this transformation is a sustainable competitive advantage.

Customer experience

The business management’s goal is to augment the profits, customer experience and growth. Customer experience has become more important than products. Digital transformation is one means of creating “anti-fragile” businesses that can weather, leverage, and thrive on disruptions.

International Data Corporation (IDC) MaturityScape for DX. IDC developed the MaturityScape for organisations that are pursuing digital transformation.

The five levels are ad hoc, Opportunistic, Repeatable, Managed and Optimized said Chege adding: “It identifies the stages, dimensions, outcomes, and actions required for businesses to digitally transform their operations, organisations, products, and services. It also serves as a guide for business and technology executives to identify areas in need of improvement in support of digital transformation.”

Chege said: “Madison leveraged on the IDC MaturityScape, two years ago. We were at the level one of maturity by then. Currently we are at level three of maturity. Two years from now, we expect to be at level five where we shall be a disruptor. We shall remake existing markets and create new ones.”