While the pandemic may have pushed enterprise decentralization into the mainstream, it’s a concept that many cloud-forward businesses have been working toward since well before 2020. Much more than just a means for productive social distancing, decentralization strategies are designed to make businesses more agile by default.

In the broadest sense, enterprise decentralization allows IT organizations to shrug off the legacy systems and on-prem hardware that confined business to the office. Instead, decentralized organizations leverage a tech stack populated increasingly by cloud-based solutions that can enable worker productivity from virtually anywhere. This means fewer tools hosted in bulky corporate data centers, and perhaps most critically, cloud-based data storage and exchange. 

There are of course many different flavors of enterprise decentralization, and limitations on an industry-by-industry basis for cloud migration generally. For starters, many businesses won’t ever be able to fully offload all of their corporate data to cloud environments, or take the risk of enabling remote access to certain kinds of data in the first place. That’s why many organizations take a hybrid approach to enterprise decentralization (which many modern workers are likely familiar with) where they leverage a mix of cloud and legacy on-prem solutions, ostensibly to ensure sensitive data remains secure. 

However, even businesses that take a hybrid cloud approach are often following their own custom strategy. While the general idea of decentralization hinges on greater adoption of cloud, there is truly no one-size-fits-all strategy when it comes to migrating workflows and data to new environments—nor are the tradeoffs, benefits, or consequences the same for every organization. 

Unique business considerations for enterprise decentralization

In healthcare, for instance, HIPAA and other regulations put serious boundaries on the protections organizations must place on personal identification information (PII). At the same time, healthcare providers need to be sure that patients have quick and easy access to their medical data—and that’s not even taking into consideration global data protection and governance standards that make quick access to personal data an enforceable right in some jurisdictions. 

Businesses in finance have their own wealth of considerations and potential pitfalls when it comes to decentralizing their operations too. For starters, it’s important not to conflate decentralization in finance for blockchain or crypto, which at their baseline are designed to separate investments from traditional, legacy money markets. But for traditional banking systems, the rigidity of legacy systems are part of the appeal, as most consumers simply require an accessible and secure storage partner for their assets and income. This calls for financial information to be stored in heavily privatized and secure environments out of necessity.

But as consumer tastes change—with mobile banking and healthcare applications as two examples—workers increasingly favor digital workflows in kind. This is where the lines between enterprise decentralization, digital transformation and the various degrees of cloud migration and adoption begin to blur, as each of these concepts ultimately hinges on giving modern workers the “user experience” they increasingly covet. 

All of this puts the onus on IT, and calls for a reframing on how enterprises view this area of the business in 2023 and going forward.

Start with IT decentralization

While enterprise decentralization is the result, IT decentralization is the means to that end. For businesses to successfully deliver greater agility across the business and the level of digital UX that modern workers crave, they need to move IT teams out of their traditional silos and instill digital literacy across the business. 

Historically, IT was treated as the one-stop-shop for all enterprise tech. These teams were the gatekeepers when it came to accessing corporate data assets, using specific tools and even leveraging hardware—and usually within the four walls of the corporate office.

Today, the corporate network is the new office, and rather than securing the corporate on-prem data center, IT and NOC teams need to focus on the extended, distributed enterprise network first and foremost when chartering their marching orders. In fact, it makes sense for many organizations that haven’t yet to fully separate their network operations teams from their traditional IT unit so that there are experts focused explicitly on ensuring network performance and security in a decentralized setting. 

Simply put, network management requires undivided expertise and management to ensure enterprise success, and splitting this focus by putting an undue IT burden on network-focused teams is too risky.

At the same time, greater technological literacy needs to be mandated across the organization. With low-code and no-code solutions gaining prominence across marketing, sales, HR and virtually all other traditional corporate environments, traditional IT leadership—whether it’s the CIO, CTO or even engineering leads—need to create some kind of partnership resources for tech-savvy individuals on non-IT teams. 

According to a recent survey from Zoho, 99 percent of IT leaders polled agree that marketing (52 percent), finance (45 percent), and sales (43 percent) teams need more technical training to launch low-code/no-code products. It may make sense that going forward, separate IT professionals will be staffed within each one of these corporate departments as opposed to centralized within a single IT department that encompasses network management (ie. the legacy IT model). 

This of course is easier said than done, as dismantling and decentralizing a core unit of the business will inevitably come with objections. For instance, without a clear order of operations when it comes to approving new tools company-wide, businesses run the risk of Shadow IT with all of its potentially hazardous repercussions. There’s also the risk that teams pay for redundant licenses for certain products being used across teams, or simply an oversaturation of applications that ultimately hinder productivity rather than nurture it. 

The biggest consideration for enterprise leadership to bear in mind when navigating decentralization is ensuring that technical expertise is instilled in all areas of the business. At the same time, decentralization cannot be conflated for siloing, as department-specific technical leads must still work in concert with their peers across the organization to ensure redundancies are avoided and standards are adhered to across the business.