Going digital has prompted organizations to increasingly look to the cloud to drive business agility and innovation. This shift has altered the role of the IT leader and affected the way businesses can navigate this incomparable time of change.
Move beyond legacy systems and adopt a next-gen cloud
Maintaining first-generation cloud technology can be a challenge for many IT departments because that earlier technology had data, security, analytics, and migration options as afterthoughts. These earlier clouds were built primarily for two types of customers: Customers building new businesses on a cloud native foundation and customers shifting nonessential workloads from on-premises. Also, maintaining aging infrastructure requires capital and employee resources that can otherwise be deployed to higher value pursuits.
Even for organizations that have already moved to the cloud, demands placed on the cloud continue to march forward. For example, the latest artificial intelligence (AI) models now need 300,000 times more computing power than these models required less than a decade ago, according to PwC.
Public clouds are becoming the default that runs nearly every new enterprise software application. They’re also the first choice for production workloads, giving rise to a next-generation cloud.
Going digital has shifted IT’s role
The role of IT leadership has been progressively moving from technology manager, toward transformational spearhead and business strategist. This move has accelerated throughout the pandemic. This is because organizations recognize the need to go digital. They recognize that applications bring speed, flexibility, and scalability to a full swath of business functions that are then also continuously improved with automation, analytics, and machine learning. Only a cloud built for these requirements and expectations can suffice.
IT spending continues to shift to public cloud computing, and IT leaders can transform their business. According to Gartner, by 2024, more than 45% of IT spending on system infrastructure, infrastructure software, application software and business process outsourcing can shift from traditional solutions to cloud.
IT leaders are driving digital transformation initiatives that enable greater agility, innovation, and growth. In fact, in an IDG survey, 92% of CIOs say that their role is becoming more digital and innovation focused, and 81% of CIOs have implemented new technology to enable better customer experiences and interactions.
Accelerated innovation continues to fuel cloud adoption, bolstering priorities around data and analytics, and meaningful customer experiences.
The growing need for cloud
Increasing numbers of organizations are charting their course toward digital transformation and therefore cloud computing. They recognize the short-term benefits of cloud, and they know cloud adoption across their business positions them as early adopters of innovations in the years ahead.
Adopting cloud-based AI technologies to sift through increasing amounts of data can give businesses an edge with predictive knowledge used to build better and more personalized experiences for customers, or project fluctuations in product demands, for example. Cloud analytics can be a lifeline by enabling sharper data-driven decision making quicker.
The pandemic has been a catalyst for digital transformation reliant on the value, flexibility, and speed of cloud computing. “The economic, organizational, and societal impact of the pandemic will continue to serve as a catalyst for digital innovation and adoption of cloud services,” said Henrique Cecci, senior research director at Gartner.
This fact is evident in remote work. The pandemic has shown that employees need to have access to corporate resources through cloud technologies. Companies increasingly need to prioritize cloud-based services, applications, and security to support their remote workforce.
We see it in the global supply chain, which has been one of the surprising persistent news topics of the past year. The need to fulfill demand and, at the same time, the need to establish new supply chain management systems, has increased. Companies are responding to this time by making their supply chains more robust.
The examples go on. A surge in cloud adoption is happening across industries globally. Small businesses to large enterprises are moving to the cloud.
Going digital
For all businesses and organizations going digital and moving to cloud, the right cloud provider offers an infrastructure that can accommodate any workload, automation, security, and support. Data sits at the center of any digital-first strategy because powerful analytics can affect all business decisions and customer interactions at all levels.
Businesses haven’t just adapted but have also continued to transform during this time of change. Going digital has prompted organizations to increasingly look to the cloud to drive business agility and innovation.
Transforming your cloud strategy to support going digital
Many businesses have turned their focus to gaining even more value from data, reshaping operations and infrastructure using cloud to gain automation efficiencies, and reinforcing a security strategy for improved business resiliency. For guidance on transforming your cloud strategy to support going digital, read Oracle’s IT leader’s guide to cloud strategy transformation ebook.