Cloud computing is creating new waves of opportunities. It is accelerating digital transformation, empowering businesses with agility to respond to changing market needs, and increasing the scope for innovation. Here’s how organisations like yours can turn to the cloud to fix your biggest challenges and gain better business outcomes.
In the past few years, digital transformation has gained significant ground and is now forming the core of business strategy. Organisations are constantly looking for new ways to enable digital change quickly and cost-effectively.
The need for digital transformation was intensified by the emergence of COVID-19. Organisations were scrambling to move to the cloud quickly to achieve digital transformation and ensure business continuity. They realised that without a solid foundation of cloud computing, digital transformation is an impossible goal to achieve.
That’s why, according to a Gartner report in 2020, 70% of companies that were using cloud services, immediately planned to increase spending on cloud due to the unprecedented disruption caused by COVID-19.
Today, as a result, 83% of enterprises already use a cloud service and the market is expected to reach $623.3 billion worldwide by 2023. Cloud computing is creating new opportunities for businesses across the world and solving some of their most pressing challenges and leading to better business outcomes. Here’s how.
Cost Optimisation and Effectiveness
With an on-premises infrastructure, organisations have limited ability to adjust to changing needs and ensure optimal resource utilization. Cloud computing, on the other hand, provides a wide range of services, types of infrastructure, advanced automation capabilities, and choice of geographic locations. This improves the ROI of IT expenditure.
According to McKinsey, cloud promises more than 20% rise in the overall financial performance across industries. Cloud computing increases workforce productivity by automating tasks and reducing hardware maintenance and infrastructure costs. Another factor is the need for low capital investment. With a pay-as-you-go pricing model, organisations don’t have to pay for services, software, and products that are not being utilised.
Driving Innovation
Cloud computing frees up IT resources and personnel, enabling them to focus on innovation and creating better business outcomes instead of spending time maintaining infrastructure.
According McKinsey, 75% of cloud’s predicted value comes from boosting innovation. As mentioned earlier, cloud computing is the fuel for accelerating digital transformation. Adopting the cloud enables organisations to implement emerging technologies like AI, machine learning, IoT, robotics, 5G, and edge computing that empower them to build new and innovative products and services.
Cloud providers offer innovative technology platforms along with their cloud offerings that help organisations boost innovation and digital transformation.
Improving Business Agility
Legacy on-premises IT infrastructures are rigid, hard to maintain, complex, and expensive. They are incapable of providing the much-needed agility for businesses to respond to dynamic market changes quickly. The cloud enables greater automation and simplifies internal operations to increase agility and help organisations to take advantage of a competitive edge faster, widening the gap between competitors.
According to an IDC study, 63% of organisations expect to increase spending on cloud-based applications to improve business agility and enhance their competitive positions.
Enhancing Customer Experience
Customer experience has always been a challenge for organisations across the world. Today’s customers are looking for instant gratification and convenience. According to Deloitte’s 2021 global marketing trends, 57% of respondents said their organisation significantly altered digital platforms to better meet customer needs in response to the pandemic. But how? By moving to the cloud.
The cloud shortens response times, generates deeper customer insights that enables faster decision-making, and creates differentiated human experiences. It makes this possible by collecting customer information cheaper and faster and by leveraging cloud-enabled advanced analytics to gain insight into customer behaviour. The cloud automates, customises, and optimises client engagement with decision engines that leverage machine learning, allowing client engagement teams to provide personalised customer experiences.
Scalability and Faster Time to Market
According to Gartner, only $55 worth of product releases take place on time. While faster time to market is a good measure for organisations to ensure competitive differentiation, it is extremely hard to achieve. Organisations that manage to launch their products on schedule are much more likely to meet their goals in the same year. And almost half of the delayed launches fail to meet the target. The cloud accelerates and speeds up product development and provides scalability to respond to spikes in demand and resource availability as and when you need them. It enables employee mobility allowing them to work anywhere, anytime. This enables them to collaborate, and work better and faster without disruption.
Introducing New Products and Services
Cloud computing provides organisations with the flexibility to create new products, services and experiences for their customers, and enables businesses to experiment easily and cost-effectively. Cloud-based new product development is a functionality that was previously not possible with on-premise solutions.
For example, rigid legacy systems aren’t feasible to adapt to real-time technologies that depend on the speed of data transfer. Access to smarter technologies and the ability to adopt APIs—that enable introduction of new products and services—is possible only with a cloud-based infrastructure. A McKinsey report states that accelerated product development can generate $770 billion in value due to democratised access to computational power and other factors.
Gaining Real-Time Insights for Faster Decision Making
Speed has always been a key competitive differentiator, but never more than now. Being able to extract insight and intelligence from data with analytics—quickly—is a critical capability that many organisations are trying to build. The cloud can shrink the barriers—cost, time, effort—your organisation faces as it seeks to maximise the value of its data to hasten decision-making.
It can cut the complexity associated with the different stages of the data lifecycle, whether you are initiating big data analytics, or advanced analytics projects, such as machine learning. In addition, with hybrid cloud architectures, such as edge computing deployments that leverage private 5G networks and IoT, enterprises can capitalise on the possibilities of real-time data processing and shrink latency, thereby boosting the performance of advanced analytics solutions.
These can significantly enhance the speed and the accuracy of real-time applications like those used in manufacturing to enable autonomous vehicles or leverage augmented reality solutions that guide service technicians and shop floor operators; in smart cities to better manage traffic; and in security services to analyse footage in real-time and increase reaction speed.
Ether Cloud: Simple, Seamless, Scalable
It is imperative to partner with a reliable cloud provider that can help organisations like yours make the most of the cloud opportunity. Ether Cloud Services can help organisations speed up business and digital transformation with its broad range of platform-agnostic cloud services including cloud infrastructure and migration solutions along with tools, automation, consulting and advisory that are tailor-made to meet all your critical business needs.
Ether offers all the building blocks of digital transformation including cloud computing and security platforms and solutions, connectivity and SaaS offerings, as well as world-class professional and managed services.
It also provides industry cloud offerings, multi-cloud management platform, and the benefits of on-ground support. Ether’s simple, seamless, scalable, secure, and superior cloud solutions provide everything you need–from back-up and DR to big data and machine learning; from computing, networking and storage infrastructure to DevOps and microservices; and from IoT to multi-cloud management. Ether’s cloud services can help businesses get the most from hybrid and multi-clouds.
Start your cloud journey with Ether Cloud Services today.
