The Cloud Journey, Part 5 – Innovate

Getting started with cloud often causes challenges and risks. SoftwareONE can help you adjust and plan your cloud strategy. In this series of posts, we’ll cover the different aspects of a strategic approach to cloud:

1. Evaluate 
2. Migrate 
3. Manage
4. Secure 
5. Innovate

Once you are managing your cloud environment well, you can turn your attention to projects that will truly transform the way your organization operates. In this final post, we look at how some organizations are using the cloud to modernize their data platform with Azure.

Over the past weeks we took you along your cloud journey – educating you on how to get started, how to plan your first migration steps, and how to secure and manage your cloud environment. By going through all these phases, we hopefully made it clear how beneficial cloud can be for your overall business. Public Cloud enables organizations like yours to be far more agile while reducing IT costs and operational expenses. In addition, cloud models enable organizations to embrace the digital transformation necessary to remain competitive in the future.

Let’s have a look at why your cloud journey shouldn’t end after migration but should continue into the innovation phase. Cloud innovation is the key to business development and thus business growth, and can leverage the same technologies as much larger organizations without the burden of investing in expensive data center resources and highly skilled IT personnel. IT departments are now enjoying cheaper and more scalable services. While this is significant in its own right, it has also set the stage for the cloud’s next phase - acting as an enabler of business modernization. After all, the question for many CIO’s and IT Managers should be “now that we’re in the cloud, how can we innovate?”

Before looking at how innovation drives your business development it’s crucial to understand why so many companies are now making their move into the public cloud. From a high-level perspective there are several aspects that drive the decision, such as:

• Datacenter contract expiry
• Quick integration of acquisitions
• Urgent capacities needed
• Software and hardware refresh
• Security threats
• Compliance
• Application Innovation
• Software End-of-Support

Once this demand is answered, the next step to further nurture your cloud investments and innovate what you already own: data. When speaking about innovating data we can mean different actions such as evaluating a new service or product or looking at a new way of working that will help your co-workers achieve more revenue or increase business productivity. All of this is considered to be “innovation in the cloud”.

One of the main assets of digital transformation is data. It’s at the heart of today’s business landscape – a ubiquitous resource that companies can leverage for innovations and insights. It’s all around us, and with the cloud, it can be mined very easily to provide valuable insights that will help you to come up with recommendations on how to improve your business. However, while the data might already be available, there are different ways to collect the data and turn it into intelligent statements that will serve as a solid base for your decision-making process. While you might choose the predictive model or the prescriptive model, it’s the quality of the data that makes the difference. If you don’t have a lot of data in your environment to understand what happened, why it happened and how to fix it, then you won’t have enough helpful information.

Understanding the importance of data always comes with the next question of “Why”. Modernizing your cloud estate can help yoboost your business in different areas:

• Enable Innovation - to unlock your digital transformation scenarios, accelerate speed to market and create new business models
• Mitigate Risk – with a version-less, managed platform freeing yourself from patching, upgrade, and EOS cycles forever and automated, modern security capabilities such as Advanced Threat Protection built-into services
• Optimize Cost - PaaS Machine learning based continuous performance optimization helps you significantly lower costs

Once you are managing your cloud environment well, you can turn your attention to projects that will truly transform the way your organization operates. Here, organizations can start to innovate with capabilities like Amazon Relational Database Service or Azure SQL Database Managed Instance. These technologies enable businesses to simplify application components by consuming these as services rather than servers – leading to fewer things to manage and lower costs. Some organizations are already using the cloud to modernize their data platform with Azure. SoftwareONE is at your side to guide you through the different aspects of Azure Modernization, helping with things like:

• Migration options, migration tools & frameworks
• Security considerations
• Azure hybrid use benefit - what is it & how can it help?

Cloud is a force for innovation because it becomes the bedrock for creating new things: the cloud enables projects to be spun up quickly which allows businesses to prototype rapidly and learn quickly from what doesn’t work. Combined with agile processes, organizations can build working prototypes fast. All in all, cloud can be an agent for new architectures and processes.

At the same time, cloud is also an innovator for ‘the old’: the cloud presents businesses with the opportunity to re-evaluate their application portfolio and retire, consolidate, and resize many services and applications.