Disrupt. Transform. Repeat

The cloud and infrastructure series: Article summaries

Business, technology, and risk leaders need to stand together to successfully navigate today's maelstrom of disruptive opportunity: Inevitable migration to the cloud, Big (often dark) data, IoT, connectivity, automation and robotics, cognitive computing, X as a service (XaaS), containerization, analytics, and blockchain. These topics are complex enough in isolation, but interdependently they share one thing in common: all enable real-time performance advantages for you and your customers. This new POV series covers off these emerging business and technology issues, breaking them into byte-sized pieces and prompting critical questions.

Public cloud migration

From proof of concept to full-scale migration

Within five years, more than 40 percent of enterprise workloads will run in the public cloud. But despite all the potential that cloud offers, getting from a few "proof of concept" projects to the full-scale migration of hundreds of applications interwoven with databases, external services, and distributed legacy infrastructure (not to mention regulatroy and security imperatives) is a big ask. Even cloud-savvy teams must look beyond technology to meet the challenge–to distrupt, transform, repeat. 

Cognitive computing and robotic process automation

The fourth industrial revolution

Robotic process automation or RPA, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are opening up opportunities for cost savings, reducing errors, increasing scalability, and sharpening compliance. Cloud can help you take advantage by virtualizing resources, connecting discreet systems, and crunching big data at incredible speed. In theory, this combination can help free your business from repetitive tasks and empower your people to be more innovative and strategic. But to harness this exponential opportunity, organizations may need to rethink business cases and operating models wherever people and technology intersect.

Containerization

Performing across operating systems, processes, and platforms

The speed of business today can demand on-the-fly customization, instant scalability, rapid response to emerging security challenges–which cannot always be achieved with traditional on-premise systems. Containerization creates a loose copuling between different workloads and their underlying infrastructures. This enables portability and flexibility, creating opportunities to dynamically deliver workloads while managing costs and performance points. And containers are engineered to perform across operating systems, processes, and even platforms. 

Data and analytics

The data-in-the-moment revolution

The ability to quickly product value from data, whatever its form and wherever it resides, is redefining industries. And while it's critical to plan a technology architecture that will allow you to find and unlock the value of data in all of its forms faster than your competition, consider starting with the right business questions–and then augmenting your ability to solve for them. It just so happens that powerful cloud solutions are suited to overcome myriad infrastructure, platform, data, risk, and compliance challenges. 

Everything as a service

Casting core modernization in a new light

Consumer perceptions of ownership, service, and access are evolving fast–increasingly, the expectation is that there should be little friction between desire and need satisfaction The same applies to enterprise IT: employees, business partners, vendors, and customers all want easy access to critical services that someone else supports and maintains. Everything as a Service–or, XaaS–casts core modernization in a new light: yesterday's legacy overhaul is today's operational and business transformation aimed at creating (and monetizing) stabler, safer, smarter, faster ways to satisfy employees, partners, and customers. 

Retail

The customer-driven cloud economy

Complex, mobile, data-driven personalized, and fast? Sounds like a job for a cloud. Delighting consumers with new products and experiences (and strengthening their loyalties) using cloud is redefining what it means to be a retailer. Sectors are blurring, barriers to entry can be frictionless, on-demand and mobile fulfillment are no longer nice-to-haves. The technology is ready and waiting. So what's the hold up? Getting to grips with broader (and ofter harder to solve) sector, operational, finance, human capital, and transformation dynamics that go beyond knowing what the technology can do–and helping ensure that it's planned, built, and easily managed into the future.