Winning with cloud

Firms are starting to appreciate that cloud offers a new platform to drive revenue from data

Business visionaries have their heads in the cloud. Savvy companies see cloud as a platform for exploiting a variety of emerging technologies — artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, the Internet of Things (IoT), big data and predictive analytics — to develop state-of-theart solutions to transform their businesses and their industries. Cloud is now the go-to platform for driving enterprise transformation.

In an IBM Institute of Business Value (IBV) survey of 2,000 executives from 19 industries in 16 countries, 67 per cent of cloud visionaries said they will invent first-of-a-kind customer experiences with the help of cloud.

By 2020, 90 per cent of business models may be driven by cloud. To be competitive, every organisation needs to understand the opportunities of cloud and how to take advantage of them. Here are five steps to a winning cloud strategy:

Prioritise disruptive and emerging technologies. Identify and develop use cases where technologies such as AI, blockchain, IoT, big data and predictive analytics can transform your business or industry. For each use case, define business values, including expected value and customer experience consequences, then weigh risk and your finances.

Build your cloud strategy. Identify which workloads you should move to the cloud to meet your business objectives and product development goals. If some workloads cannot be moved right away, that’s fine. Developing a hybrid approach can be very helpful as you think through your overall strategy for public cloud usage. For best results, make your strategy enterprise-wide and encourage co-creation efforts across different parts of your company and value chain.

IBV research shows 79 per cent of cloud high performers run security more often in the cloud today. Seventy per cent run mobile in the cloud. Sixty-five percent of surveyed cloud leaders expect to be running IoT apps in the cloud within the next three years.

Nurture an “innovation first” culture. Reward innovators and highlight their successes. Encourage developers and data scientists to avoid working in traditional silos and begin collaborating across teams. Demonstrate how their achievements could not have been possible without integration of cloud with new and emerging technologies. Further innovate those solutions with the help of clients and business partners.

Reap competitive and financial rewards. As companies begin to adopt cloud, they are finding that it's a platform for new ways to handle and drive revenue from data. Think about how your company can create cloud-enabled offerings, enter new competitive territories, spawn new sources of revenue and create original business models. Work with ecosystem partners to increase efficiency and improve customer service. Apply RoI to measure financial success.

Always follow security first approach. As more organisations move to a cloud-native model for developing apps and managing workloads, cloud computing platforms are rapidly limiting the effectiveness of the traditional perimeter-based security model. While still necessary, perimeter security is by itself insufficient. Because data and applications in the cloud are outside the old enterprise boundaries, they must be protected in new ways. Hence, enterprises need to have cloud security focus areas build within their growth strategies. Focus on identity and access; network security; data protection; application security; and visibility and intelligence will help as they scale their business.

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