The Value of Cloud for Solving Complex Business Challenges

Business leaders, and particularly CIOs, are juggling an ever-expanding remit coupled with an increasingly challenging market environment; the accelerated pace of digital transformation brought on from the Covid-19 pandemic, supply chain challenges and a global economic downturn. And none of these pressures show any sign of decreasing.

All these factors contribute to the costs of doing business and can make it difficult for businesses and IT leaders to realise the value of cloud and digital transformation.

A Digital Transformation journey is all about shifting the organisation away from manual to highly automated processes, to improve the overall customer experience and industry competitiveness. This journey also typically involves a fundamental shift in how organisations mobilise and operate, with a common shift to agile tribe-based models that enable businesses to introduce change through innovation more rapidly.

In this context, the adoption of Cloud transcends IT, as it more naturally aligns to these models of operations, rather than being a handbrake.

The value cloud adoption can bring to organisations is estimated by McKinsey to be over $1 trillion through:

Significant saving on seed investment costs, by enabling initiatives to start small and scale as they are proven and become more self-sustainable from a business value perspective
Reduce financial risk by enabling teams to perform proof of concepts and fail fast
Avoid consequences of high regret costs stifling future innovation and therefore avoiding a fear of failure culture
Accelerate the proving of new areas of innovation by lowing the amount of upfront investment required to validate and implement
Remove the requirement of lengthy capital procurement activities, to enable the business to rapidly respond to changing market conditions in a timelier manner
Enable greater adoption of no-code, low-code services to allow teams to remove the complexity and reduce the reliance on specialised and scare skillsets

Well-planned cloud initiatives, which are underpinned by strong cloud FinOps strategies that optimise cloud consumption, can help maximise an organisations investment in cloud and help ensure full business value is being realised. Here are some of the ways that cloud can solve complex business challenges and enable a more secure future.

Creation of scalable and agile services

Cloud can foster innovation, competitive positioning, and business growth by improving performance, agility, and scalability while also reducing costs, well beyond what is traditionally envisioned from a technology change.

A recent IBM study shows that 56% of non-users plan to implement microservices by 2023, while 78% of users will expand their use. Whilst microservices can often be an overused buzz word amongst business and technical folk alike, this architectural approach aims to achieve agility with how technology supports business functions in a few ways:

Components within an application can be scaled independently of each other, based on where the business needs the capacity. This significantly reduces waste and cost associated with having to upgrade entire applications to support the additional capacity requirements for one highly used component;
Changes are simplified as the specific component represents a smaller subset of the application logical, which needs less resourcing for development and end to end testing;
As microservices represent a subset of a larger application, the fault domain is significantly smaller and therefore represents a lower risk to the business if an error occurs. This enables the business to identify and approve changes faster and, as a result, improve agility.

SXiQ has been a trusted partner in supporting the balanced implementation of containers, microservices, and APIs for countless sectors, helping organisations migrate off their legacy infrastructure and allowing them to unlock innovation pathways created by cloud adoption. In different individual partner-focused combinations, these cloud aspects can act as the fulcrum point for scalable IoT.

Streamlining People, Processes and Change

Companies can leverage cloud technologies to become more productive, reduce human error, and boost productivity, far exceeding what is achievable within traditional Data Centre environments. Data centre environments typically include a broad range of 3^rd party solutions, with disparate or often incomplete modern API interfaces that enable automation at scale.

Cloud significantly changes the operating model for how IT organisations provision, secure and lifecycle resources. Firstly, by breaking down traditional technology driven domain silos and removing the dreaded handover tax (Resolution Time). And secondly, by operating as a Software Defined Data Centre (SDDC) allowing a broad range of provisioning, reporting, remediation and change activities, to name a few, to be automated using code and as a result streamlining support activities to be able to do more with less and at much greater velocity.

The process of transitioning from legacy solutions to the cloud brings operational change across the organisation. By adopting a cloud strategy that is governed, for example, by a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) – representing people, processes, and change management – organisations will unlock the real value of cloud from their investment by:

Better support and more flexible operating models that enable decentralisation of responsibilities to deliver the greatest business value, whilst maintaining a tight control on overall governance of each solution and its alignment to corporate compliance requirements;
Provide the business with a central point of knowledge for how cloud can be leveraged to innovate, for either existing or future cloud technologies;
Provide a core set of foundational components that ensure organisations can leverage cloud services rapidly, whilst ensuring the necessary controls and standards are in place and applied in a consistent and auditable manner;
Manage overall cloud expenditure to ensure it is constantly optimised, but also enabled costs to be more transparently reported against the business services they are supporting to enable improved decision making;
Act as cloud consulting partners that help guide teams through plan development, management, implementation, testing, and training.

By involving the workforce in shaping process changes, providing subsequent training for end users and upskilling IT and support teams, organisations can overcome complex business challenges and reduce the impact of operational change.

Overcoming Business Challenge Complexity with Cloud ROI

Most organisations that successfully adopt the cloud are seeing how it can turn IT from a project-based cost centre to a product-based revenue and business outcome centre. Organisations can see cloud value in how it:

Empowers customers to control their own experience with products, services, and communication;
Enables internal end users to work more efficiently through process improvement, access, and integration across applications, workloads, and databases;
Provides the platforms and tools to innovate in terms of new products, services, and operational efficiencies.

The cloud can deliver immediate and long-term value and benefits to meet immediate and long-term needs and budgets, above and beyond IT. For example, organisations are seeing how remote workforce needs can drive long-term collaboration and communication needs via remote assistance for field workers.

With a cloud transformation partner like SXiQ, organisations can create a flexible and clear path to specific business outcomes while enabling resiliency that can overcome unexpected business and market changes in a global business atmosphere. A successful cloud strategy helps your organisation re-conceive the way it operates to be more agile, secure, and competitive.

Having the right cloud transformation partner can support the development and execution of a results-driven cloud strategy. This makes it easy for IT leaders to convey value to business leaders via incremental execution at the right time to maximise business outcome benefits within the budget.

To learn how SXiQ can partner with you to leverage cloud value that solves complex business challenges, visit our Cloud Services page.