Digital transformation adds business value by ensuring agility, cost effectiveness, faster and broader access to insights, and improved customer service capabilities. Many businesses are already in the process of embracing digital transformation, some are in the planning stages, and many others have completed partial transformation.
Whatever the stage may be, leaders design their strategies for accelerating digital transformation to achieve some of the following goals:
- Simplify data access
- Move away from expensive legacy on premise solutions
- Gradually move into cloud with a ‘Hybrid IT’ approach
- Increase availability
- Achieve high speed recovery
- Improve mobility to different infrastructures and platforms
- Comply with security and quality standards
With a business-facing and holistic view of digital opportunities and threats, and trend-spotting of changes in the digital competitive landscape, leaders are keen to turn the tactics derived from strategies into game-changers. To achieve this, each project under the digital transformation are usually assigned with an owner. In some cases, a single cloud provider is leveraged although presence of one or more cloud providers per organizational unit or functional teams is not unusual.
Accelerate your digital transformation
Regardless of the ecosystem, the key in digital transformation is to streamline interconnectivity among cloud providers as well as on premise systems. Synchronization and service flexibility are common challenges in a complex environment where on premise systems and one or more cloud providers are involved. Overcoming this hurdle becomes reasonably simpler with the selection of highly-accommodating cloud providers.
In a complex digital ecosystem, accessibility, computation and retention of data within multiple systems are the most common needs. Challenges arise if there are any restrictions in methodologies within a system dictated by out of the box system feature sets. Smart cloud providers are not necessarily product-centric since they are lenient to their clients’ business values, and usually repurpose system features with managed services without impacting the system core. Such an approach helps alleviate the digital transformation ensuring a fully transparent process with few changes, while maintaining no steep learning curve for internal business users, customers and end-users.
For a successful execution of a digital strategy, leaders should initiate change within their organization by defining who should lead the efforts and how they should be sequenced; this eventually applies to cloud providers alike. IT is often perceived as the tightest digital choke point as it is mired in old processes and needs significant adaptation for improved alignment with an organization’s digital strategy. This causes exponential increase in expectations from cloud providers and their tailored services portfolio.
In some cases, leaders go through prototyping prior to mobilizing or commercialization, which demands cloud providers to be agile and reasonably flexible. In this case, a service-oriented architecture within the cloud provider’s domain helps in conjunction with flexible managed services where a myriad of micro-services can be repurposed into one.
Customers should let their cloud providers to tag along through all stages of their digital transformation including initial planning. In digital transformation, this helps cloud providers to adapt and reengage if needed. Customer demands and trends are shifting quickly, where cloud providers can help materialize strategic vision and business goals.
