According to analysts, spending on public cloud services will reach nearly £100B by 2019, and at nearly 20% compound annual growth, it represents the fastest growing segment of overall IT spending by far (nearly six times the rate of overall IT spending).
There was an understanding of cloud technology as a way to save on IT infrastructure costs, or a place to help secure and backup company data, but the idea of the cloud being a fundamental driver of business transformation still hadn’t caught hold in many boardrooms.
Here’s how these five stages are being used to transform a number of different industries including retail, manufacturing, professional services and the public sector.
Get Cloud Ready
The first step in your journey to the cloud actually isn’t done in the cloud at all: it’s making sure that you are adopting infrastructure that is built for modern workloads and modern threats.
Build Hybrid Capabilities
Once you’ve upgraded your infrastructure, you can then take a strategic approach to which workloads you want to move from on-premises into the cloud; or said another way: lifting and shifting. Taking this hybrid approach gives organisations a good blend of flexibility and control.
Experiment and Scale
You can easily change the types and amount of cloud services you need, you can easily scale-up ideas that work, or learn quickly and move on from ideas that don’t. As you create new applications and business processes you’re also able to ensure that all the enterprise data shared in the cloud is safe and expertly managed.
Understand Through Data
The more you do in the cloud, the more data you’ll generate and access. The more understanding you can get from that data, the greater value it provides. As I alluded to earlier, in the digital economy, data is the new currency.
Embrace The Intelligence Of Things
Whether you’re a manufacturer utilising advanced IoT to develop self-diagnosing and self-healing robotics, or a local council using machine learning to optimise public energy consumption, the cloud can enable you to change the way you bring value you to your customers and constituents.