Cloud Strategy - Your Accelerator for a Successful Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is a fundamental requirement for businesses to stay relevant and profitable in today’s competitive digital economy. And adopting the cloud is one of the biggest accelerators driving successful digital transformation journeys. Cloud is the new normal for businesses. The unprecedented industry challenges that impacted business continuity during the pandemic, only made organizations conscious and accelerate their digital transformation. This is evident from the fact that about 61% of organizations adopted the cloud during the pandemic for better business elasticity, collaboration, agility, and cost efficiency.

To meet the changing customer expectations and market dynamics, organizations need to invest in an effective cloud strategy that optimizes existing processes and creates a platform to build innovative digital customer experiences. It makes way for organizations to leverage the power of the cloud to scale their business and achieve operational efficiency. 

Therefore, to expedite your digital transformation journey, you need to have a sound cloud strategy that assists you in building a cloud-based organization and migrating existing applications and processes.

A good cloud strategy pays off!

A well-designed cloud strategy optimizes business outcomes including speed-to-market, resilience, and agility. Your cloud strategy should help in the modernization of existing applications, aid cloud-native application development, and provide strong governance while migrating data to the cloud.  The result of such a cloud strategy is:

1. The Modernization Effort:

   Businesses will experience better user experience and reduced costs with better security

2. The Cloud-Native Application Effort:

   Businesses can adapt and scale whenever required according to the market needs and evolving customer expectations to deliver enhanced customer experiences

3. The Regulation Effort:

   Businesses can migrate critical applications to the cloud without compromising regulatory data compliance with complete visibility

Elements of an Effective Cloud Strategy

Cloud transformation is a crucial factor in every organization's digital transformation. An enterprise cloud transformation strategy must enable a business to leverage its digital services faster to meet customer expectations and maintain a competitive edge in the market. An effective cloud transformation strategy comprises five elements:

• Enhanced Scalability: Scalability is an important factor that makes the cloud popular. A scalable cloud solution enables an organization's IT to respond quickly and address increases in storage and performance.
• Business Agility & Resilience: An agile and resilient cloud solution makes businesses responsive to customers’ changing needs. It enables an organization to rapidly adapt to the changing market scenarios and outrun the competition.
• Operational Excellence: An effective cloud transformation strategy enables an enterprise to identify operational risks, handle sudden spikes in demand, and mitigate them quickly.

• Cost Optimization: An effective cloud strategy reduces dependency on on-premise servers and makes the cloud a cost-effective option in the long run without affecting the top-line results.

• Regulations & Governance: Adopting cloud strategy brings in the data privacy, and security needs being addressed at an organizational level as the business evolves.

How to Choose the Right Cloud Transformation Strategy

It is imperative for the cloud strategy to align with the business strategy. Irrespective of what service a business is providing, the cloud solution should enable and support the business in all its pursuits. The three elements to consider while aligning your strategies:

1. Analyze: Analyse the current business model and strategy with the proposed cloud strategy curated to fit into your business ecosystem. 
2. Evaluate: Look out for all the available resources in the cloud and check which would help to advance the business strategy. Identify a technology architecture and technical partners that can offer the required capabilities.
3. Measure: Define KPIs to measure the effectiveness of the cloud strategy in terms of the company's needs and how this strategy will provide long-term support and success.

Once the cloud strategy is aligned with the business strategy, the next step would be to determine the cloud architecture best suited for your business. Your cloud strategy should help you unlock the digital capabilities required to grow your business. Here’s what you need to do to ensure a seamless cloud strategy implementation:

1. Analyze the gaps in your organizational capabilities compared to your competitors and how you want to position your business in the market.
2. Align business objectives with IT as all IT-related investments should create or optimize business value
3. Choose the right cloud hosting platform that is secured, cost-effective, provides stability, tech compatibility, quick deployment frictionless upgrade, security practices, and cost-efficient.
4. Closely monitor and optimize system health and performance to avoid issue proliferation or major setbacks during cloud migration.
5. Periodic data governance to simplify data collection, storage, and use within the cloud. This maintains compliance and enables collaboration, even as the data landscape grows larger
6. Mitigate possible risks by proactively identifying security gaps with impact analysis.

With these practices, you can build a cloud-enabled business transformation strategy key to generating the ROI that your business deserves. This creates a cloud-based organizational structure that will support your business in its digital transformation journey. Your cloud transformation journey will let your business unlock benefits like streamlined operations, increased scalability and speed of applications, and cost management, and helps in accommodating new business opportunities.

Start Your Cloud Transformation with Srijan

Adopting the cloud to accelerate digital transformation makes your business resilient to withstand aggressive market shifts. That’s why it is of paramount importance to nail your cloud strategy right. Srijan’s highly skilled Platform Engineers and consultants can help you accelerate your cloud journey & adoption across a multi-cloud infrastructure to deliver fast, reliable, and secure cloud services consistently. To know more about how you can embark on your cloud transformation journey, get in touch with us today!