Cloud: The future of digital innovation

There are two important aspects of a business that ensure its sustainability apart from cost optimization. They are speed and resilience. So, what do you think helps companies to achieve them? Well, cloud computing is the answer every organization is turning to for making their businesses resilient and agile. That's exactly what this blog will help us understand - the role of cloud computing in digital transformation, helping organizations achieve business resilience and making them future-proof.

The Role of Cloud in Digital Transformation

Digital transformation has become a priority for most businesses today, irrespective of their size, revenue, and business model. This is because operating optimally and meeting customer expectations requires the incorporation of the latest technologies into all areas of the business. Hence, failing to transform digitally has become equivalent to failing to deliver value to your customers. What enables this transformation also becomes a key component of a successful business- and that is where Cloud computing comes into picture.

So, how does cloud exactly help? As we can see, the current market is changing at lightning speed and so are the ways in which the customers prefer the products or services delivered to them. This ever-evolving nature of the market makes digital transformation a necessity rather than a choice. The pandemic further accelerated the need to transform digitally if businesses wanted to keep afloat.  

Now digital transformation requires using the best apps, devices, storage and security to enable businesses to engage their customers more thoroughly. It also demands experimentation and speed without many risks involved which is where the cloud comes into the picture. Cloud has proved to be the most suitable option for enabling organizations to experiment as well as giving them the speed and resilience they need to have successful transformation journeys. Integration of the cloud seems to be the best way to go for projects as it not just provides speed, flexibility and resilience but also comes with data security-one of the biggest concern of organizations along with being one of the easiest to scale up or down as per business needs. Cloud also comes as a more economically viable option with a better ROI for these businesses which are time-bound and cost-bound. 

Factors Making Cloud the Future of Digital Innovation

Single point of responsibility:

As the IT infrastructure is growing more and more complex with time, especially in the FinTech Sector where businesses deal with sensitive data, maintaining the confidentiality and high availability becomes the focal point for these companies. Cloud helps simplify this complex landscape by being a single point of responsibility reducing maintenance costs and resources required to handle the complexities with superior technology that cloud offers.

Cost-Efficiency: 

On-premises system calls for larger expenditure since it involves annual maintenance contracts resulting in large capital expenditure to maintain systems. Cloud on the other hand gives flexibility in terms of costing and comes with different models which the businesses can scale up or down as per requirement which makes it cost effective. Apart from this, cloud also offers maintenance and support as part of the monthly costs charged making it a viable option in the long run.  By eliminating the upfront costs and providing the option of regular payments based on the services used, the cloud reduces expenses to a great extent. 

Saves Time:

On-premises set up and implementation is time-consuming owing to multiple installations and server connections required for the set up to run smoothly. This will still demand for 24x7 on-site support with resources having to manage these servers. Implementation of cloud-based solutions takes place much faster than on-premises implementations. Deployments happens faster with cloud and can be made ready-to-use in matter of few hours or days. This makes it a preferable choice as organizations always prefer better and faster solutions.  

Boosts User Productivity: 

In today’s fast paced world, customers prefer having faster solutions, faster access over time-consuming ones. Cloud and many other SaaS applications today provide easy-to-follow user interface resulting in higher productivity. Although many businesses do try replicating the cloud experience with a host of workspace applications that allow single sign-on and provides access to unified set of applications, the proximity between user and data center needs to be in minimal distance resulting in user having to connect to VPN which brings about limited usability. 

Cloud computing on the other hand comes with features like ease of use, high performance, and accessibility making it the choice for many businesses.

Offers Security and Data Recovery

Companies cannot afford to lose sensitive data at any cost. They also need to invest in disaster recovery to protect and keep their data safe. Both of which need huge investment and expertise. However, the cloud offers third-party expertise and reduces investment. Cloud-based solutions have also been proved to be trustworthy to most organizations making the decision to go for cloud-based solutions. Data loss is almost nil with periodical backups happening almost at real time. All it needs is a working internet connection.  Most Cloud services company offers data recovery and security as part of cloud offering making it a cost-effective solution as well.

Cloud computing is flexible

Cloud-based services are most suitable for businesses with fluctuating bandwidth demands as they are flexible and can be scaled up or down depending on the requirements. This flexibility helps businesses gain a competitive edge thus making cloud adoption obvious for companies who want to stay ahead of the competition. On-premises scaling requires more hardware provisioning, additional licensing, on the other hand with cloud it’s simplified with just upgrading for more cloud space and user access. 

Conclusion

The shift from traditional ways to cloud technologies isn't just the current trend but also the future scenario. And this shift, as discussed above has various reasons. Cloud computing enables supply chain optimization by providing infrastructure, platform, and software solutions, and thus leads to financial and operational benefits. Cloud makes the digital transformation journey seamless and cost-efficient by providing access to third-party networking and storage and many more benefits.

In short, Cloud has become the key to digital innovation by proving to be the most reliable option for businesses who want to keep their data safe, run efficiently, make the most profits, perform optimally and gain a competitive edge by providing the best customer experience.

The article has been written by Amit Gupta, Founder and CEO, Rapyder Cloud Solutions