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CLOUD IN DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

One of the key enablers of digital transformation projects is the cloud as it offers the scale and speed that is needed for businesses to focus on transformation with a clear impact on the role of the IT department. It has been reported that enterprises are adopting cloud computing for pursuing digital transformation. Around 83% of workloads were hosted on the cloud and it is believed by 74% of Tech CFOs that cloud computing will have the greatest impact on their business.

89% of enterprises plan to adopt or have already adopted a digital transformation business strategy with Services (95%), Financial Services (93%), and Healthcare (92%) at the top. In another report, it was also said that executives considered digital transformation important for survival in the competitive space. Companies are moving and promoting digital transformation because it enables an enhanced customer experience, faster time to market, and greater innovation.

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

Digital transformation is the process of making use of new technologies to redesign and redefine relationships with customers, employees, and partners.  Benefits of Digital Transformation are:-

• Modernize infrastructure
• Manage data
• Get insight
• Gain faster results
• Solve business problems
• Cost-effective

Cloud Computing

The process of Maintaining, Storing, Managing, Processing, Analytics, and Securing data by exploiting a network of Internet-based servers is known as Cloud Computing. The process of saving data in the cloud instead of physical devices helps in better device management and helps businesses to manage the administration, to streamline processes, improve productivity, optimize costs and enhance customer digital experience in a better and organized way.

Types of Cloud Computing

• Software as a Service ( SaaS): third-party cloud provider hosts software applications and provides them on demand to customers all over the World.
• Infrastructure as a Service(IaaS): third-party providers deliver software and hardware tools, operating environments, databases, or computing platforms that are conceived to develop Internet applications.
• Platform as a Service(PaaS): third-party vendor which offers access to computing resources such as storage, data center space, security, scaling, network components, or servers.

Benefits of Cloud Marketing

• Cost Effective: They provide a scalable framework model where businesses only need to pay for the used services making them cost-effective.
• Back up and Data Restoration: Once data is backed up into the cloud it can be easily accessed and restored later on.
• Mobility: Cloud can be accessed through any device and thus making them useful to use due to their mobility
• Accessibility: Cloud can be accessed anywhere and anytime through any device with a proper internet connection thereby providing excellent accessibility. It increases organization productivity and efficiency because the data is always accessible.
• Flexibility: The feature of the Cloud that allows Users to scale services to fit their needs, customize applications, and access cloud services from anywhere with an internet connection making them flexible.

Hybrid cloud

Hybrid Cloud uses the mix of both public and private cloud enables organizations to bring about regulatory compliance, ensure data supremacy, cost optimization, and security. It has been reported that around 85% of the firms have started using a hybrid cloud strategy. It helps in the faster delivery of apps and services.

Challenges faced in implementing Cloud for digital transformation:

In the recent Garnet report, it has been reported that $257.5 billion was spent on cloud in 2020 alone, and then it is forecasted that the technology will account for 14.2% of the total global enterprise IT spend by 2024. But there are also some challenges to face on the way. Some of them are:-

• Data: The main motive of every individual and organization is to protect its data and hence there is a rise in cloud computing. A data breach can lead to serious consequences so companies are contemplating whether to trust a third party infrastructure for protecting their data
• Regulatory compliance: It is not easy to understand the regulatory standards but lack of consistency across governing bodies only aggravates the problem.
• People: The biggest blocker to delivering at speed is people in most projects and the cloud is no different. A cloud-first architecture breaks the traditional model with functions delivered as services by Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) rather than in-house by banks, thus forcing organizations to review their ways of working to ensure outdated expectations are not blockers to innovation.

What to expect in the Future?

• On perm being obsolete: It is predicted that the cloud will become one of the most important parts of digital transformation. Then one has to justify why one shouldn’t make something on the cloud rather than why you should.
• Re-introduction of location: Distributed Cloud brings into account the core principles by allowing banks to run public cloud infrastructure from a wide range of locations. Cloud provider's infrastructure in data centers of third parties is monitored and managed from a single control plane. This enables lower-latency compute capabilities and provides greater control for banks to dictate where their data is stored thereby making it easier to comply with data privacy regulations.

Conclusion

Cloud is becoming the foundation of enabling and growing digital transformation. Many organizations are not yet using the cloud but it is clear that in a digital transformation economy hybrid cloud and multi-cloud architectures will become of utmost importance and organizations will start building fully cloud-enabled services themselves. It is expected that by 2030, cloud-hosted architectures will become the norm.