Cloud Adoption for Digital Transformation
Effective cloud adoption is key to a successful digital transformation for business growth. This is why 94% of enterprises use cloud computing in some way or another.
Recent surveys suggest that while more than half of organizations have been leveraging the public cloud for less than three years, a third has already changed their hosting strategy by expanding existing deployments or adopting a new cloud model.
CIO's and CTO's are focusing on digitally transforming their business model to cope with the post-Covid world as cloud technologies can help businesses transform quickly and efficiently. It also helps offer intelligent customer solutions for a better customer experience.
What is Cloud Adoption?
Cloud computing has been in use in the form of SaaS for more than a decade in the form of Email, CRM, and other online subscription-based services and has become synonymous software as a service (SaaS), where users can consume functionality through an online application without having to install it on their hardware or with the support of an in-house IT team. There are other models to choose from, such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or Platform as a service (PaaS), which have come up in the last decade and have accelerated the companies to move their applications, databases, and digital assets to the cloud. Cloud adoption has enabled organizations to deploy their applications faster and offered the flexibility of scaling up or down as needed.
Main Factors Influencing Cloud Adoption
According to Forrester Research, Cloud adoption is usually triggered by the need to improve an organization's business and operational performance. The following factors can significantly influence Cloud adoption:
- Rise in demand for faster deployment of new services
- Business transformations such as digitalization, mobility, social media, or accelerating revenue growth
- Increase in competitive pressures and regulatory changes (e, three main factors influence cloud adoption:
- Budgetary considerations
- Ability to manage customer and market relationships
- Cloud provider capabilities
What are the Benefits of Cloud Adoption?
Digital transformation is key to ensuring future competitiveness. Cloud computing can significantly help businesses in their digital transformation, enabling them to accelerate innovation while keeping costs low. Cloud adoption allows companies to easily improve their business performance by reducing time to market by as much as 50%
In addition, Cloud adoption offers the following benefits:
- Improved service and experience for end-users
- Lower costs and more flexible IT budgets
- Greater speed to market and higher customer satisfaction rates
- Increased organizational agility and business growth
Setting up the IT infrastructure to handle all the digital transformation challenges requires a lot of expertise and equipment. This becomes a huge financial burden, not to mention added maintenance and running costs.
Cloud adoption helps avoid the IT infrastructure cost and reduces the overall operations expenses. Cloud servers like Amazon EC2, Azure B series, and many others cost a fraction of on-premise CapEx.
Cost-effective models like pay-as-you-go make it more affordable and scalable. A recent study suggests a 15% decrease in overall IT spending after cloud adoption.
Accessibility & Collaboration
Cloud makes it easy to access the required information from anywhere globally, using any device. In the post covid era, when 90% of the workforce is working remotely, Cloud-based services make it easy to access and collaborate with the team from anywhere in the world. Cloud offers easy document sharing instant messaging chat rooms for a live discussion with others within the organization. Cloud is an effective platform to conduct real-time online meetings, presentations, and training sessions over the internet without any geographical boundaries.
Enhanced Security
There is a myth that cloud platforms are less secure. However, unlike an in-house system, cloud hosts usually have a ton of security checks and features that result in better security.
A recent study showed a staggering 91% increase in security when businesses switch to cloud technology because of the following reasons:
Cloud service providers employ a complete security and compliance spectrum and have a host of security checks that can prevent potential harm to your digital assets.
Reliable cloud systems use data encryption to transfer data over networks and rest, making it more secure.
Cloud security also helps reduce internal data theft (which recorded a higher percentage than external attacks), making it difficult for employees and contractors to copy sensitive data files.
Security updates also help keep the data secure from external malware and theft attempts.
Better Reliability
Cloud systems are more reliable than a traditional in-house system, where either the data is stored on a local server or kept on personal systems.
Most cloud providers offer 99.9% of the uptime SLA with a geo-redundant model with backups on multiple locations. The digital assets on the cloud are more reliable than a local server setup, where a single power outage can render it inaccessible, or worse, lose all data.
With the cloud, It's easier to recover lost data as well. You can retrieve the system's previous state with a simple request.
Pitfalls
However, the cloud comes with certain pitfalls that need careful planning and execution to overcome. Here are some of the common mistakes that companies often make while adopting the cloud:
Not understanding your needs or neglecting your existing Infrastructure.
Companies often assume that their existing Infrastructure will suffice for the new cloud environment. They tend to fall into the trap where they start building a strategy around third-party service providers rather than being technology agnostic.
-Migrating on-premise applications and servers without proper planning may result in an extremely challenging IT landscape.
-Ensuring if the data resting on the cloud will comply with the mandatory government compliance, be it CCPA, HIPPA, PCI, PII, SOX GDPR, or any other.
The Impact of Cloud Adoption on Digital Transformation Cloud adoption can significantly help businesses with their digital transformation, allowing them to focus on the growth of their business by automating IT processes. Cloud computing will enable companies to strengthen their organizational culture and empower employees, thus helping them achieve efficiency and cost management. Cloud computing can significantly help businesses unlock new revenue streams, improve customer relationships, and increase competitiveness.
