5 key factors for a successful cloud transformation

Fortunately, not all of the impacts of Covid-19 have been bad. The overnight application of working from home accelerated digital adoption plans by a few years. Now that the worst of the pandemic is behind us, businesses are excited and better positioned to move forward. And one of the ways many are migrating is to the cloud.

For many organizations, innovation is the first step forward. Recently, when 800 executives across Asia-Pacific, UK and North America were surveyed, 89% said they were under pressure to innovate to overcome disruption and uncertainty in their industry . Interestingly, this even applied to sectors such as infrastructure, construction and transport, which have been slow to modernise.

For organizations that want to grow, there's only one environment for innovation, and that's the cloud. Companies that aren't there yet should start with cloud transformation to prepare for next-gen innovation.

However, many organizations mistakenly assume that this simply requires removing on-premises infrastructure and moving it to the public cloud. They need to understand that to extract full value from the cloud and create a strong foundation for innovation, they need to focus their cloud transformations on the following:

Data is the engine of innovation, and it's impossible to stem the flow: A survey released in January 2022 found that in North American companies with more than 1,000 employees, the monthly growth rate average data volume was a staggering 63%, and the average number of data sources was 400. It is absolutely impossible to manage information of this size and complexity with an on-premises infrastructure. That's why over 99% of respondents said they would migrate their data to the cloud within two years.

The cloud not only offers unlimited storage and compute, but also a host of analytics, machine learning, and AI-as-a-service solutions, so businesses can extract accurate, actionable, and in real time.

Improving the supply chain is a clear use case for cloud, data, and analytics that will resonate with most businesses.

Supply chain disruption, which began during the pandemic in 2020 and extended with the Russian-Ukrainian war in 2022, continues to pose challenges for businesses in 2023. However, they can mitigate the impact by improving end-to-end supply chain visibility. and leverage that visibility (read the data) for supply chain modeling, strategic planning, and risk and reliability assessments, using non-cloud solutions.

Toyota is a great example of using the analytics power of the cloud to strengthen the supply chain. In North America, the company's aging on-premises vehicle data warehouse (VDW) was struggling to handle increasing data volumes. By modernizing the VDW with a next-generation data lake on the public cloud, the company was able to reduce complexity, eliminate data duplication, improve data quality, and create a foundation for sophisticated analytics.

One estimate is that 60% of enterprise data is already in the cloud. Thus, cloud security is a top priority for leaders of data-driven organizations. The good news is that hyperscalers have made huge strides in securing their environments. Nevertheless, companies must take certain steps to secure their cloud transformation.

The first is to move from network-centric security to user-centric security. Indeed, when users access cloud data from anywhere, traditional network perimeter security becomes unnecessary. Instead, t...