Contents
Introduction
The challenge to retain customers, remain accessible, relevant, and profitable to an ever-evolving customer base in today’s digital era is high and gaining traction. Embarking on a digital transformation journey is key to stay ahead of the competition. Digital transformation starts and ends with the customer. One of the fundamental digital transformation requirements is to focus on customer experience transformation; know-how customers interact with products and services.
To remain competitive in the constantly changing global digital landscape, digital transformation is a necessity. Adopting a digital transformation strategy enables businesses to meet customer expectations, solve business problems, transform business models and operations. In this blog post, we explore the essence of cloud migration and its role in an organization’s digital transformation and learn the benefits of migrating to the Cloud.
What is Digital Transformation
Digital transformation is a process of strategic integration of digital technologies to create new or modify existing aspects of a business, fundamentally changing how businesses operate and deliver value to customers to meet changing business and market requirements. Digital transformation is all about transforming customer relationships. Unless you don’t analyze your customers’ needs, you will not be able to transform your business digitally. It demands a cultural change that requires organizations to experiment continuously and get ahead.
Digital transformation can deliver some significant benefits such as offering actionable insights based on deeper analytics, accelerating business processes, reducing costs, increasing responsiveness to the customer, improving customer service, and increasing safety and quality products and services.
Businesses today heavily rely on data for their day-to-day operations. And traditional IT systems are not suited todigital transformations, as they are not flexible and responsive enough. Hardware maintenance, limited data storage, expensive upgrades hinder the acceptability of traditional IT systems.
To address these increasingly complex data transmission requirements, storage, and data analysis, businesses should consider migrating to cloud infrastructure. In most cases, companies are not able to digitally transform their business unless they move some of their applications to the Cloud. Transitioning to the Cloud is the fundamental first approach to digital transformation.
Everything nowadays runs on Cloud-based services. Be it individuals or companies, everyone relies on the Cloud directly or indirectly. These services are so common that you may be using them without even realizing. Cloud computing has completely transformed the way in which businesses operate, store and access data. And it is becoming the preferred method for business data and application management due to its flexibility and functionality.
Simply put, cloud computing is an enhanced IT service model where servers, networks, data storage, software, and applications are enabled through the internet. Businesses
leverage this technology to offer high computational power, on-demand data storage, data analysis, and various other cloud capabilities at a lower cost. This process of transitioning services and applications to the Cloud is known as cloud migration.
What is cloud Migration?
Cloud migration acts as a stepping stone for businesses to accelerate the process of digital transformation and explore exponential growth opportunities. Cloud migration is a process of moving digital assets such as data, business applications, workloads, and IT resources from legacy or on-premise infrastructure to a scalable data center to the Cloud.
One of the first steps in cloud migration is panning and adopting a cloud migration strategy. There are various types of cloud migrations strategies that an enterprise can adopt- rehosting, re-platforming, repurchasing, refactoring, retiring, and retaining.
The next step in the process of migration is to choose a cloud environment: Public Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, or private Cloud. Followed by migrating your apps and data and then validating post-move success.
With cloud migration capabilities, businesses can migrate any workload, storage, websites, applications, databases, physical or virtual servers, on-premises data centers to the Cloud. Cloud migration is a step further in the digital transformation of the core business applications.
Benefits of migrating to the Cloud that accelerates digital transformation.
Mobility
Since all the business data is stored in the Cloud, it can be accessed from any part of the world on any digital device such as laptops, mobile phones, and tablets. Organizations can now easily interface distinctly, allowing access to employees who travel constantly, work remotely, and consultants without any downtime. With migrating to the Cloud, you don’t have to be at a specific location to deploy updates, fix issues; it can be done from any part of the world.
Remote access makes it much easier to collaborate with the entire team, empowers fast turnaround time and instantaneous issue resolution, all of which are digital transformation goals. Enterprise mobility is crucial for businesses with workplaces spread across various locations. Besides increasing employee productivity, mobility also improves customer and employee satisfaction.
Cost efficiency
Organizations worldwide are trying to cut their cost, and moving to the Cloud undoubtedly has initial investment, but if executed appropriately, the ROI of cloud migration easily justifies the investment.
Apart from this, cloud services offer a ‘pay-as-you-go’ model; thereby, you do not have to pay for resources you haven’t consumed. With cloud computing technology in place, businesses no longer have to bear the cost of expensive on-premise hardware, software licenses or worry about the maintenance cost of malfunctioning parts.
Since all the business data is stored in the Cloud, it can be accessed from any part of the world on any digital device such as laptops, mobile phones, and tablets. Organizations can now easily interface distinctly, allowing access to employees who travel constantly, work remotely, and consultants without any downtime. With migrating to the Cloud, you don’t have to be at a specific location to deploy updates, fix issues; it can be done from any part of the world.
Remote access makes it much easier to collaborate with the entire team, empowers fast turnaround time and instantaneous issue resolution, all of which are digital transformation goals. Enterprise mobility is crucial for businesses with workplaces spread across various locations. Besides increasing employee productivity, mobility also improves customer and employee satisfaction.
Scalability
Migrating to the Cloud enables businesses to scale up or down in real-time based on their IT requirements and business plan. Cloud migration empowers businesses with the ability to dramatically reshape their infrastructure and workloads to accommodate
real-time and future IT requirements. Cloud services reduce wastage of resources, thereby boosting RIO. Scalability is one of the most pursued characteristics that promote digital transformation.
Operational flexibility
A cloud solution empowers enterprises with the ability to flexibly test and deploy applications from the backend—easy deployment and removal of applications from the cloud environment without worrying about compatibility and performance issues. Cloud solution offers flexibility to make last-minute changes and still face no operational dysfunctions.
The cloud solution also allows the flexibility of selecting specific prebuilt tools and features as per business requirements, making it easier to accelerate their own digital goals.
Cloud promotes increased collaboration
Collaboration in a cloud environment allows your business to collaborate across teams, giving its employees, contractors, and third parties room to communicate better and access the same files in real-time, thereby offering better visibility and control to avoid conflicts and confusion.
Better storage
Cloud environment offers unlimited capacity to store any type of data at a minimum cost. Depending on the requirement, businesses can expand and shrink the storage capacity. Businesses can choose from different storage offerings, depending on security needs and other considerations such as availability of the data, performance, and access frequency.
Disaster recovery
On-premises data centers are subjected to the risk of losing the entire data due to natural disasters, software failure, hardware damage, or other similar issues. In contrast, the Cloud offers data backups on remote servers to avoid any data loss. Recovery of data is quick in Cloud, which improves business productivity and ensures business continuity.
Increase business agility
Cloud enables businesses to access on-demand IT resources to react to market conditions more quick-ly in rapidly changing industry dynamics. Whatever you need is available on-demand basis; you don’t need to wait for weeks or months to procure new inventory and storage. Thereby helping businesses to get products or solutions quicker to markets, expand into new markets, and innovate quickly for competitive advantage to speed up their digital transformation.
Never miss an update
With cloud environments, Service providers regularly update their services to give users the most
up-to-date technology. Cloud-based applications automatically update themselves, saving time and effort to perform a manually.
Leverage new technologies
Transitioning to the Cloud opens up numerous doors of opportunity to adopt modern technologies to stay competitive with the ever-changing customer requirements. Enterprises can leverage AI and ML capabilities, which aren’t feasible on-premises for enhancing workflows and gaining business value from your operational data.
Competitive edge
Cloud services are gaining traction and increasing in popularity, yet many have not moved to the Cloud. However, those businesses that adopt cloud services find many benefits that Cloud offers and yet to explore the full potential of the Cloud are at a distinct advantage over competitors that have not to transition to the Cloud yet. Transitioning to the Cloud puts you ahead along the learning curve ahead of your competitors.
Conclusion
Cloud services are gaining traction and increasing in popularity, yet many have not moved to the Cloud. However, those businesses that adopt cloud services find many benefits that Cloud offers and yet to explore the full potential of the Cloud are at a distinct advantage over competitors that have not to transition to the Cloud yet. Transitioning to the Cloud puts you ahead along the learning curve ahead of your competitors.
In conclusion, considering the enormous benefits that transitioning to the Cloud offers to businesses, it is fair to say that cloud solutions are increasingly becoming the new normal. Cloud migration benefits are pragmatic and boundless. Before embarking on your journey towards the Cloud, you should acquire a complete understanding of cloud migration, its strategies, challenges, advantages, disadvantages, and more.
Cloud migration acts as a solid foundation for your business to accelerate digital transformation and deliver improved performance and innovative solutions in the long run. Cloud migration drives digital transformation, which in turn drives IT optimization. Once the businesseas have completely transitioned to the Cloud, the operational and economic benefits will be noticeable.
