Ahead of any cloud strategy, one must understand their organization’s requirements, the needs of customers, and the strategies in place to meet their organizational goals. You may be attempting to modernize an existing solution, build a native cloud solution, or create a data platform. When it comes to cloud providers, determining the right one will make the difference in being able to excel operationally, quickly adapt to changes, reinvent the way you connect with customers, and generate new opportunities for ongoing performance.

The last year brought ongoing change to all industries globally. While businesses continue to address challenges and give priority mindshare to adaptability – of workforce, supply chain, consumer habits, and more – they’re also aggressively pursuing new opportunities. Organizational leaders must ask questions such as: What does the future of work look like? How can we prepare, adjust, and ensure success in this model? How can we look beyond this point to succeed and thrive for the long term?

If organizations want to effectively manage change, they must rethink what it means to transform. Here are a few examples of how and why companies and organizations are digitally transforming:

  • Hybrid workplace, digital customer interaction, digital commerce/services
  • Mergers and acquisitions, new unmet customer needs, regulation changes
  • Solutions that reduce costs, realign the supply chain, modernize core systems
  • Back-office upgrades, customer & business experience enhancements    

Transformation segments defined

Digital transformation requires a new approach for creating, selling, delivering, and consuming products or services using public, private, and hybrid cloud platforms to meet changing business and market dynamics. 

Data transformation enhances analysis to create meaningful improvements in performance—as measured by increased earnings by companies, efficiencies by the public sector, and impact by non-governmental organizations. Data transformation is usually some combination of improvements across data infrastructure, data capture, and data analysis. 

Estate modernization is a large-scale move of on-premises data centers to the cloud, where the resulting benefit is an organization freed from running the technology infrastructure. This estate modernization and infrastructure-led transformation gives rise to a cost-effective, secure, high-performing cloud environment designed to handle workloads at scale. 

It’s essential for every organization to select the right cloud provider to carry out its unique transformation strategy. And the same holds true for their cloud journey as driven by business opportunities, customer needs, and goals. For this reason, each segment of transformation must include a full range of services to support the path to cloud.  Cloud makes it possible for companies to respond quickly to changes in the market, as well as to reduce costs, increase resiliency, and focus on innovation.

There are several considerations to make when assessing the right cloud provider. You will want to measure the options that each provider offers and how they will support your objectives and overall organization. Some of the primary areas to consider for almost every business are:   

Migration

Original cloud providers developed their cloud with the intention of supporting their own business. Most cloud vendors created new markets by producing scale-out solutions for web-scale and cloud native applications, but have had mixed results with enterprise applications.  When choosing a cloud provider, think about how they will support your applications now and in the future. 

Security

As organizations continue to migrate applications, data, and workloads to the cloud, there is an increasing requirement for organizations to address cloud security risks and misconfigured public cloud serves. It’s essential to understand precisely what security goals you have, and the security measures that are offered by each cloud provider to protect your data in the cloud and on-premises. 

Automation

As cloud adoption increases, IT operating expenses also rise due to the complexity in managing operating systems and databases of a cloud-scale. It’s important to understand what sort of autonomous services are offered to help the delivery of infrastructure for all applications in order to help eliminate manual processes.    

Analytics

Analytics is another parameter that requires careful consideration. It’s no longer a reporting and data visualization tool but rather a strategic platform that enables decision-making at all levels. Choosing a cloud provider that offers reliable analytics and being able to view all information from various sources together enables valuable opportunities to learn from past and current performance, and plan for the future. 

Ask the right questions

Considering that cloud technologies drive the foundation of digital transformation, it’s essential for organizations to ask the right questions when selecting the best supporting cloud provider. Organizations must look for a cloud provider that enables innovation and quick reinvention.

Read the 8 questions to ask your cloud provider to get the answers you need. 

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