The five key areas that all leaders in this Digital Transformation era must lead: speed to market, cost effectiveness, flexibility of operations, business resilience, and innovation capabilities.
Cloud technology allows startups, midsize companies and even government agencies to access big tech capabilities including compute power, algorithms, programming tools, and architectures. The progress toward the cloud had actually been quite gradual prior to year 2020. Things are speeding up ever since Covid-19 hits. Companies and agencies of all kinds quickly learned that they had to depend on cloud technologies to enable their entire staffs to work remotely, to ramp up digital commerce, to provide entertainment and more. We now see this shift to 80% taking place in the next three years.
“Can I really trust my data in the Cloud?”
Cloud providers operate comprehensive data security programs so you do not have to. On-premise infrastructure is prone to the kind of small mistakes that determine cyberattacks can exploit. However, the main public cloud providers are able to provide advanced data security controls, including data encryption, database monitoring, and access control.
“Do I have to get rid of my legacy infrastructure once and for all?”
Executives naturally are not keen to start over from scratch, most leaders want to keep running legacy systems as long as possible despite the limitations on being innovative. A “lift and shift” strategy is a good approach for companies. Imagine moving your entire house to another city without having to pack and unpack or even rethink the layout of your rooms. This makes sense to many companies as it minimalizes the disruption to customers and provides relief from pressing concerns like outages.
“How do I make the right Cloud choices for my business/organization?”
Software as a service (SaaS) started the Cloud revolution. Companies and agencies could roll it out quickly, fund it directly from business budgets, and standardize processes while also enabling innovation.
Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and Platform as a service (PaaS) emerged as cloud computing matured, giving businesses a high level of control over the alignment of business and IT objectives.
IaaS is a simple way to access computing and data storage resources. With IaaS, an organization rents servers and storage in the cloud rather than purchasing and maintaining its own infrastructure. PaaS in popular choice for businesses and agencies that want to create unique applications without making financial investments. As for SaaS, the most used cloud application service is an important means for organizations to access software applications.
“Do I have the skills I need to take advantage of the Cloud?”
There is no shortcut here, but making aggressive plans today is an essential first step. For instance, ABC company’s cloud-driven business transformation has big goals for innovation and how its people work. The company anticipates creating hundreds of new jobs in specialized roles and building the skills of thousands of employees they can accelerate. A lower investment approach could be to encourage employees to seek outline instructions to build their skills even in some free courses.
It is crucial for leaders to be involved in the cloud journey as it is too important to a business’s fundamental competitiveness to be treated as an IT program. In fact, it is about creating a platform for the efficiency, innovation, and growth that will determine the future of your company.