Today, technological evolution and constantly growing customer demands are altering the way organizations work. They are leveraging digital technologies in order to transform their operations, build new revenue streams, revolutionize their customer experience and stay ahead of their competition. According to a recent survey by IDC, Digital Transformation spend will reach $1.7 Trillion worldwide by the end of 2019, which is a 42% increase from 2017.
Digital transformation involves a lot of planning and has to be carried out in different stages starting from the most fundamental function like an email and gradually moving towards more complex pieces of technology. Thus, it is very important for the organizations to adopt cloud as a part of their strategy to set up a robust digital transformation framework.
Embracing cloud can modernize your IT infrastructure and help you serve your customers digitally in innovative ways. Gartner predicts that cloud revenue will total $278 billion in 2021. As per the recent survey by Microsoft, 79 percent of the enterprises interviewed work with more than one cloud provider, with 29 percent working with four or more cloud or hosting vendors. Multi-cloud is one of the building blocks of digital transformation, making it an unavoidable step that gradually everyone will have to take.
Cloud is important for Digital Transformation-
Digital transformation of your organization requires you to be prepared for agility, elasticity- the capability to scale up and down, efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Cloud can deliver all of these features to you. Implementing cloud and digital transformation together have resulted in enormous growth for organizations. It is important for you to continuously innovate in order to outstand your competition, and cloud is the catalyst that can fuel the innovation.
Let us look at a few areas where cloud can enable your digital transformation journey:
1. Scalability
Cloud provides you a provision to scale up or down instantly to accommodate a surge or a drop in your applications or servers. When your data storage is physically constrained, you have limited options to scale your environment in order to meet your growing business demands. Cloud offers automatic scaling or de-scaling of your storage, servers, and network bandwidth to fulfill your changing business requirements.
2. Cost Reduction:
The scalability offered by cloud helps you reduce your cost. It saves you from the trouble of investing in expensive hardware and servers since everything is on cloud. Also, since the majority of cloud offerings are delivered as SaaS, you only have to pay for the resources you use.
3. Agility:
Cloud offers the necessary infrastructure, computing abilities and platforms that can help you stay agile and open to changes.
4. 24* 7 Accessibility:
Since cloud can be accessed anytime, from anywhere, and at any device, you can share real-time information with others easily and quickly that can be viewed by everyone at the same time, thus improving productivity.
5. Security:
Moving your database on cloud protects you from threats like system shutdown, and data breaches. You can create multiple backups on cloud.
Multi-Cloud: Key to the future
Organizations strive to provide better customer experience which is at the heart of Digital Transformation. The continuously increasing customer demands are driving a number of organizations to use an array of cloud offerings and it has become difficult for a single cloud services provider to deliver everything you need. Here are a few reasons why multi-cloud is essential for your Digital transformation journey.
Hand-pick services
By choosing multiple cloud services providers, you can hand-pick the best services from each one of the cloud services providers. Rather than changing your business processes to adapt to a specific provider’s offerings, you can explore multiple providers and find the best match for each of your applications.
Enhance security
Keeping all your resources on one cloud makes them vulnerable to attacks like DDoS and can take your entire operations down. Moving your systems to the cloud helps you reduce your capital expense costs but the cost incurred due to cloud downtime can cause massive damage to your business. Using multi-cloud architecture can make your company’s services resilient against these attack - even if one cloud goes down, others will be available to take the load until the recovery of your service.
Manage resources efficiently
When you host all your data on one cloud, you tend to hire people with expertise on that particular cloud platform. For ex. If you host your resources on AWS, you will look for an AWS certified engineer to manage it for you. People with specific skill sets are hard to find and difficult to retain in the industry. What if a person leaves the organization! Your business operations can be affected drastically. However, if you have multiple cloud platforms, in such a scenario, you can transfer your data from one cloud to another to ensure your business runs smoothly until you get a right fit to work on the former cloud.
Avoid vendor lock-ins
Let us take a scenario where you find a perfect cloud services provider that fits your requirements and hosts all your applications efficiently. What happens when you outgrow your service provider offerings or find a better deal? When you restrict yourself to a single cloud vendor, you either end up working on your only cloud services providers’ terms or tend to spend a lot of money and time in migrating your applications from one platform to the other.
A multi-cloud strategy plays a pivotal role in providing you the visibility, cost control, and required performance to succeed in the new economy, bringing about regulatory compliance, and ensuring data supremacy and security.
Cloud4C is one of the leading global cloud and managed services providers offering multi-cloud management solutions and IT services on cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud, enabling your digital transformation journey while dealing with the complexities of the multi-cloud architecture.
