According to the combined Executive Cloud Survey conducted by CITO Research and Commvault, more than 90% of the IT professionals and executives are concerned about the rate of innovation among cloud providers and their ability to keep pace with it.
The underlying reason is that they understand that competitiveness in the modern world is all about keeping pace with the cloud. It’s true that established firms with cloud and legacy infrastructure and apps have been facing challenges to match the development velocity and quality of cloud-native startups, cloud automation and innovation has started bridging that gap.
In this guide, you’ll learn how cloud keeps pace with innovations and help organizations achieve business goals.
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Cloud Strategies to Keep Pace With Innovation
Since IT dollars are precious, it’s critical to allocate the budget to cloud investments that will add the maximum value to your business. A challenge for businesses is that the competition is demanding innovation faster than IT can deliver solutions.
Hence, your cloud strategy will enable growth and create a competitive advantage only if it supports innovation. To accelerate innovation, evaluate every cloud investment based on business goals that must be met. Let’s now take a look some of the specific accelerators of innovation:
Automate IT Systems
Businesses that are most advanced in cloud automation are quickly outpacing the competition. The ultimate goal for automation should be scalability and a reduction in the time to market. Automating your IT systems and legacy systems allows you to manage traditional infrastructure and apps in a competitive, scalable, and agile framework. You should be able to deploy code continuously and deploy end-to-end automation throughout the development lifecycle.
When you eliminate manual tasks, new features or software can be shifted from development to production within minutes, even for traditional applications. This capability is referred to as Enterprise DevOps. When it comes to automating legacy IT, internal resistance is inevitable but communication and support from senior management facilitate strategic success. Once you’ve explained the benefits of automation and the shift to DevOps, and convinced them, you’re only a few steps away from reaping the rewards. Based on researches, cloud automation leads to increased business revenue, increased overall profitability, improved customer experience, and enhanced the company’s agility.
Through cloud automation, you should be able to deploy new code and provision infrastructure rapidly enough to keep pace with the cloud natives or companies born-in-the-cloud.
Increase IT’s Ability to Change More Quickly Through Modernized Infrastructure
According to the IDC, 65% of businesses will extensively invest in new technology platforms to modernize legacy systems through 2023. To make sure that hardware isn’t a hindrance, the most proactive companies are running their software on the most up-to-date hardware.
The most cost-effective and least complex way to make that initial move to an innovation-centric cloud is to get out of the data center business. To hyper scale your business at a low cost, consider using Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) or Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). This should enhance your IT’s agility and flexibility to handle change while freeing up the IT budget and resources.
When choosing a PaaS or IaaS provider, look for the one that won’t get you locked into your ERP vendor’s cloud technology stack. Keep in mind that the proprietary versions offered by some ERP vendors are not as robust as those provided by Microsoft and Amazon, the biggest investors in cloud technologies.
Enrich Core ERP Systems with Cloud Technologies
Deploy cloud-based capabilities for your ERP system that support customer and user-facing business processes. To understand the customer plans of SAP and Oracle for moving to the cloud, Rimini Street recently conducted two surveys. One survey showed that 80% of the customers had no plans to move to the vendor’s SaaS ERP, while the other survey revealed that 65% were not sure about making the shift.
SERVICE DISABLED VETERAN OWNED SMALL BUSINESS (SDVOSB)
Cloud-based ERPs allow you to shift your focus to user/customer engagement because you no longer rely on precious IT resources and infrastructure. Such a system is less time-consuming and expensive to deploy in the cloud since they are more loosely coupled than ERP. They enable business growth and provide you with a competitive advantage by quickly improving user experiences.
ERP in the cloud makes sense for less complex or small to medium-sized businesses. In most cases, it will be feasible to keep the core ERP systems and innovate them with the cloud.
Consider Advanced Technologies that Align with Digitization
A major component of business innovation plans is going digital. Not all technologies can be modernized enough to play a role in a firm’s digital platform. For instance, an order fulfillment software that supports mass production using standard bills of items will be overwhelmed by the change to a business model in which each order is a custom order that generates a single production request.
Likewise, current computing capabilities may not be able to handle massive volumes of new data. For example, drones are being used to track maintenance issues in equipment where the enormous amount of data is breaking the existing security architecture.
In such cases, it becomes imperative to migrate to new technology to establish a robust platform that fosters innovation. When leveraging cloud innovation, consider making small, incremental changes rather than massive ones. This way, the size of each change will be small, yet, the rate of change will be extraordinarily high.
Small Disadvantaged Business
Small Disadvantaged Business (SDB) provides access to specialized skills and capabilities contributing to improved competitiveness and efficiency.
Final Word about how Cloud keeps pace with Innovations
By now, you should have developed a clear understanding of how cloud keeps pace with innovations. In the modern business world, if you don’t innovate today, you might be out of business in 5 years. Not only will you have huge costs but your time to market will also be too long.
Cloud technologies are rapidly enabling automation in application deployment and infrastructure provisioning, precluding the need for legacy IT approaches. It’s true that cloud-native startups have an edge for being created online, but the top cloud performers have started catching up with them. To stay competitive, you need to accelerate automation and understand how cloud keeps pace with innovations.