Leveraging Business Agility with Cloud

By Cloud Computing Outlook | Wednesday, June 30, 2021

Cloud has become the hot favorite for the organizations, today. With the help of the cloud, organizations can respond faster to the changing market as well as cater to the ever-evolving customer demands.

FREMONT, CA: A Gartner report on cloud reveals that the worldwide public cloud service market is expected to reach $331.2 billion by 2022, with compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.6 percent. This increased growth rate is observed since 2018. The word 'cloud computing,' which once was a buzzword in the early 2000s, is no more a buzzword now and is starting to indeed come of age.

Cloud has become the hot favorite for the organizations because of its agility and cost benefits. With the help of the cloud, organizations can respond faster to the changing market as well as cater to the ever-evolving customer demands. Cloud enables IT owners to invest more time advising their business associates with data-backed insights and policies to drive more business growth and faster time to market.

Why Agility?

Though businesses need agility, the need is not uniform across different functions of the organizations. It is on the top-level management to decide and prioritize which department or function needs agility before rushing headlong into cloud implementation uniformly across the landscape. It is crucial because businesses usually don't have unlimited funds. So with the existing funds, they have to operate and implement the facility. For example, a retailer aiming to double his sales through e-commerce would improve the customer experience rather than focusing on changes in the product management side.

To make the business agile in the IT landscape, companies should start assessing and defining the right processes first before moving to the implementation of the cloud. Here are a few ways to follow before implementing the technology.

Redefine Process in a Digital Native Way

The organization with a complex system needs to transform into agile, responsive entities at an enterprise scale. In the process, they have to redefine their business process by applying sentiment principles like garnering feedback from user groups, facilitating an instant simulation, providing guided practices, etc. This helps to curate ideas for improving efficiency and can reduce latency. The optimized processes thus evolved; result in seamless and superior user experience for all stakeholders

Implement Required Technology

After restructuring the processes, the next question is: which technologies are needed to create the future IT landscape? The answer to this lies in implementing technologies such as IoT, microservices, PaaS, containers, globally distributed systems, mobile apps, AI/ML, cognitive services, stream processing, Blockchain, etc.

Establish the New IT Landscape

The development of new applications with modern technologies and creating microservices architecture generate a new IT landscape. The decomposition of monolithic application allows the transformation of existing applications to an adaptive cloud architecture while building new ones that are in a cloud-native state. The applications should expose their functionalities in a platform to work in the interconnected business landscape.

Scale the IT Delivery Capabilities

It is equally essential to impart new technology skills to employees and bring in soft skills on flexible, explorative work, and risk-taking, to maximize the value derived from the latest technologies. This helps in the successful execution of the transformation and facilitates businesses partner with an efficient IT service provider.

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