Undertaking digital transformation means transforming how your IT responds to the business and identifying the success metrics that govern the digital journey.
In most organizations, the IT budget is spent on keeping the lights on, but only a fraction spent on innovation, which shapes the future of the organization. Digitization of services is a journey as opposed to prior IT investments that measured success solely based on the ‘destinations’ of time, budget, and deliverables.
The COVID-19 pandemic significantly accelerated the transition to remote working, a trend that was gaining slowly gaining momentum but wasn’t expected to be widespread anytime soon. According to the Barracuda survey, 55 percent of respondents said they would not have implemented remote working within the next five years had it not been for the current crisis. For many organizations, the change is likely to be a lasting one now that they’ve made the transition, though. More than half (56%) of respondents said they plan to continue widespread remote working after the crisis is over.
Another transition that has sped up in response to the current situation is the shift to the cloud. A full 53 percent report that the COVID-19 crisis had made them accelerate plans for moving all their data to 100-percent cloud-based model, a change that will have a long-term impact on how organizations operate.
These days it’s difficult to have a conversation about digitization without mentioning cloud computing.
Whether by accelerating innovation, enabling new business solutions, speeding time to market, or just promoting cost savings, enterprises believe it’s no longer a question of if, but when, most companies will adopt cloud technologies. There is no fixed set of directions for making any cloud journey; every cloud transformation means a different experience. The economics of enterprises that are cloud-born, which have moved to cloud for revenue generation has changed to a service model gaining more revenue despite an initial dip in profit margins.
The additional advantages that cloud delivers to your business are:
a. It allows you to develop multiple products on the same ecosystem allowing you to sell to the same customer base by driving R&D efficiency.
b. Customers who use integrated products are less likely to switch who they buy from, thereby increasing the stickiness and allowing you to generate more MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue).
But, there will always be some part of your business that will have to remain on-prem for privacy, legal, and regulatory reasons, the cloud won’t be the answer for everything. The way to approach this is to develop technologies in a manner that will work the exact same way in both on-prem and cloud environments with flexibility to move in either direction.