We all have heard this amusing anecdote around digital transformation by now who accelerated enterprise digital transformation: The CEO, CDO or Covid-19? There is an increasing concurrence on Covid-19 being the biggest catalyst of digital transformation.
Humour apart, the global pandemic has indeed fast-tracked digital agendas of many organizations globally. Projects that would have otherwise taken a few months or even years are now being squeezed into weeks or days.
The pandemic left us with very little time to prepare. It robbed organization of the luxury of time to execute long-drawn transformation projects. This led to firms hustling to enable a host of new digital tools and channels to ensure business continuity. There was no room for discussion on possible alternatives or user resistance or other adoption challenges. Even the most conventional industries embraced digital workforce models or digital customer touch points almost overnight.
Digitally transformed future
Are these shifts or transformations permanent in nature or will they fizzle out over time? Quite clearly, the future is largely going to be digital-first and digital-only. Whether brands like it or not, the future workforce and customer service mechanisms are moving rapidly towards an autonomous, self-service culture. Digital is at the core of this massive disruption that we are dealing with.
In the last few months, one thing came out quite evidently–organizations that already mapped out a robust digital transformation path are far ahead in this journey. Those who had yet to embrace ‘digital’ witnessed a relatively slower response to the disruption.
In that sense, digital is top of the agenda for organizations of all sizes and sectors. If we dig deeper, many of these successful digitally-empowered organizations have one thing in common—they have all leveraged cloud computing in a big way to modernize and stay agile. In fact, there is no two ways about it. During the pandemic, the business value of cloud came through more distinctly. Whether it’s enabling remote working systems, scaling up to meet the unprecedented market demand or ensuring more efficiency and cost optimization, cloud was and continues to be pivotal in the new normal. While this has always been the case, what changed during the pandemic is the pace at which organizations adopted to cloud as well as digital models.
For example, many leading banks in India where remote working was never a norm, enabled WFH for their employees within a matter of few days through cloud based VDIs. Organizations across industries were able to benefit from faster deployment times (on-premise deployments could take months!) and inculcated flexibility, scalability and improved security through digital workspace deployments—without really having the need to make huge upfront investment.
The need for speed has been unmatched during this crisis, is it a nimble startup or an established behemoth. Digital isn’t really a choice for most organizations, but a necessity.
Traditional deployment models may have worked in the past, but technology leaders are quickly rethinking. In today’s digital world, release cycles must vastly fasten up and huge volumes of data must be quickly analysed to arrive at insights. Operating on cloud is possibly the only way to address these challenges.
A sizable number of digital transformation projects fail because traditional infrastructure environments resist change. Technology leaders have already realized it. They know that having a few digital tools do not make their organizations ‘digital’. In fact, it requires one to look at business technology transformation from ground up. Cloud is providing the responsive and robust platform needed for digital transformation. Cloud native companies are able to get substantial leg up in the game and leverage digital to increase revenues and improve margins in today’s highly delicate market environment.
Across the board, there is an increasing consensus on why cloud is inevitable to digitize quickly and efficiently. According to a survey by IDC released in May this year, 64% of the organizations in India are expected to increase demand for cloud computing in response to the global pandemic with public cloud leading the forefront of all infra-related investments. The future of digital enterprises will be built on cloud as we know it!
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