Gaurav Aggarwal is a thought leader and strategist in Cloud and Digital Transformation with 26 plus years of experience. He is known for his innovative and disruptive approaches in driving Digital Transformation, developing scalable practices for Cloud, Application Modernization, Intelligent Experience, and IT outsourcing domains.
Organizations are reinventing their futures amid exceptional situations. Nowadays, change has become the new ordinary. That is why so many firms are reinventing themselves and moving systems and apps to the Cloud. And they’re doing it while their industries and businesses are changing. It’s analogous to a ship repairing its engine and retraining its crew while attempting to maintain speed and direction amid a severe storm. But all this hard work pays.
According to Accenture’s global survey of about 4,000 global businesses and IT leaders, nearly 65% of respondents saw up to 10% in cost savings, on average, from moving to the Cloud. But it is not the only one positive outcome. A tiny fraction of the surveyed firms—roughly 12-15 percent, depending on region—are experiencing significant benefits from their sustained cloud involvement. They profit even amid global upheavals because they see the Cloud as a springboard for innovation and new business ways.
Continuum Competitors
When companies leverage the Cloud’s capabilities, they will uncover new possibilities and alternatives for fulfilling the business’s ever-changing demands. Organizations that work in the Cloud Continuum set up a technological base that will assist them today and in the future.
These businesses are called Continuum Competitors because they employ the Cloud as a future operating model rather than a single, static destination.
Businesses are changing how they connect with customers, partners, and workers; how they create and sell their goods and services; how they construct and operate their IT systems; and how they see data and compute.
This strategy, crucially, helps them to outperform their counterparts on a variety of fronts. For example, Continuum competitors reduce costs by 1.2x-2.7x more than migration players and 2x-3x more likely to innovate and re-engineer knowledge activities. They are also three times more likely to use the Cloud to achieve at least two environmental goals, such as leveraging green energy sources, designing for lower power usage, and better using servers for a smaller energy footprint.
Viewing Cloud as a Continuum
Continuum Competitors make decisions from across the Cloud Continuum to build a unified technology and capabilities foundation that supports the business’s ever-changing demands. They recognize that the Cloud is a set of capabilities that extend from public to edge—and everything in between.
This Cloud Continuum encompasses several forms of ownership and location (from public to private to hybrid to co-location to multi-cloud and edge), all of which are dynamically enabled by next-generation connectivity such as 5G and software-defined networks.
This subset of companies uses the Cloud Continuum to visualize a path from on-premises to cloud migration to expanding and innovating with the Cloud. In addition, they may apply the Continuum concept throughout their whole technology stack, from infrastructure to network to apps and beyond.
Summary
By 2025, IT executives will witness two significant changes in cloud computing:
Cloud computing will become pervasive and omnipresent. Any apps or infrastructure that are not cloud-based will be considered legacy. Gartner anticipates that more than 85% of respondents will say that their business will adopt a cloud-first strategy.
Cloud computing will be more than just a technological approach for delivering applications; it will serve as the foundation for corporate innovation and the new resilient & sustainable supply chain. Therefore, enterprises need to use Cloud Continuum as an Innovation Catalyst.
To achieve comparable results, you must first grasp the Cloud Continuum’s potential and what it can accomplish for your business. Furthermore, your business’s leadership must embrace and instill a cloud-first culture throughout the organization.