How can Cloud drive your competitive advantage?

Just 10 years ago, cloud was just a nice to have technological innovation. However, the industry attitude has matured over the last decade and now the cloud is an integral part of business enablement and have the technological edge over competition. Progressive realize that cloud technologies can significantly improve operations, customer experience and hence improve bottom lines. With players like Microsoft, AWS, Google etc. in the fray of providing cloud platforms, it is not longer a way of just reducing the project cost – it is now a platform for innovation & competitive advantage.

According to IDC: “more than 70% of western Europe enterprise IT organisations will commit to hybrid cloud architectures by 2017, vastly driving the rate and pace of change in IT.” In responses from over 1000 C-suite executives from 18 industries, 78% of them now say their cloud initiatives are coordinated or fully integrated, compared to just 34% in 2012.

Another emerging statistic is that even with the rising use and acceptance of cloud technologies overall, almost half of computing workloads – 45% – are expected to remain in on premise data centres for the foreseeable future. Given this, it is imperative that companies determine and regularly re-assess which mix of traditional IT, public and private cloud best suits their needs.

Based on research, all current and future adopters of the cloud technology need to understand and keep three key things in mind:

In-depth understanding of business implications

The strategists, implementers and employees need to truly understand the business needs and know how technology can help deliver those needs. You can only build a hybrid, custom environment if you understand this. A thorough knowledge of target improvement areas, current performance (baseline) and implementation strategies needs to be reviewed, documented and understood.

Ability to manage multi-vendor services

One size may not fit all. It is important to understand that cloud ecosystems will be in a state of flux as more collaborations enter the mix down in the value chain. We need to look at the ecosystem as a community in which the participants can deliver more as a group.

In establishing collaborative, long term relationships with partners through mutually beneficial opportunities, companies will be able to tap into the API economy and other ‘open’ technologies that allow them to build on top of existing innovation.

Keep security compliances in mind

Hybrid cloud represents a transformation for businesses. But managing a dynamic cloud environment will require both a new mind-set to traditional approaches, but also new skills to deliver upon these.

Data protection and security needs to be built into the infrastructure by design from ground up rather than as an afterthought. If it deems a rework of IT operations, so be it. Select your vendors who are experts at security compliance in the cloud.

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