Reading Time: 3 minutes

Thrive in a Post-Pandemic World with Microsoft Azure

“In the new era of cloud, cost optimization will be crucial. Multicloud strategies will warrant provider independence and address concentration risk. The presence of in-house cloud skills will be a key indicator of enterprise agility, including the ability to distribute cloud services where customers want to consume them, on-premises and on the edge.”

Gartner, 01/22/2020

And then, almost overnight, everything changed. Once leisurely worries about vendor lock-in, lack of cloud migration skills, and cost optimization quickly accelerated into how fast organizations could digitally transform to mobilize a remote workforce, meet heightened product or service demands or adapt their business models to accommodate changing demand.

Businesses that don’t keep up risk losing big. According to a recent report, 52 percent of technology leaders expect a business to go under or be acquired if they lag in digital innovation, up from 37 percent a year earlier. Worse, 84 percent predict this dire outcome within six years.

Whether or not a business continues to exist ultimately comes down to three things:

  1. Competitiveness: Is your workforce productive and collaborative? Do you leverage your data to enhance customer service and acquire new customers? Have you optimized your operations for cost and efficiency?
  2. Agility: Can your organization quickly adapt goods and services to meet customer demand? Can you adapt your business model to take advantage of new opportunities?
  3. Resilience: Do you consider your organization to be secure against rising threats?

A holistic cloud strategy is now fundamental to a transformative business strategy. Leaders ultimately need to understand how to leverage the latest cloud innovations to deliver on their business strategy and objectives.

Data breeds success

With a cloud-based data platform and agile teams, CIOs can double, or even triple, development speed in the short term by unlocking the value of their data.

In the long term, success depends largely on the effectiveness of a company’s approach to data. But optimizing data is a sophisticated task that includes developing approaches to data governance, redesigning processes as modular applications and tapping into the benefits of flexible, scalable, cloud-based technology.

By focusing on building an intelligent digital architecture on a modern cloud platform, businesses can activate data value and reap the rewards. By putting data at the center of organizational evolution, businesses can gain clear insight across the business, make informed decisions and drive business agility.

Business agility is critical

COVID-19 has forever transformed customer lives, particularly in the adoption of digital, resembling a “decade in days” shift. These behavior changes have reshaped consumer decision journeys and companies need to adapt fast or risk losing to those who made the move to digital earlier.

Business agility is achieved by rapidly adapting goods and services to meet customer demand. Companies already in the cloud can benefit from an increased pace of product development that directly aligns IT infrastructure with business goals and objectives. Additionally, they can scale IT processes up and down as needed, optimizing IT asset usage.

Business resilience is also critically important to organizations post-pandemic and security lies at the heart of resilience.

Security is a core tenant of resilience

Insider data breach incidents, whether accidental or malicious, are on the rise and will increase by 25% in 2021.

The only effective approach to security and business resilience is a holistic, architectural approach—one that is manageable, adaptable, responsive and developed with the right partner. Organizations must continue to adapt their approaches to security and invest in new models.

By fully understanding the risks that come with the cloud—and understanding them in the context of their on-premise environments—organizations can then balance those risks with strategic decisions about their technology environment.

Even for companies that are already in the cloud, we are seeing an opportunity to better define and deploy security technology to remove vulnerabilities and reduce the risk of future attacks.

Logicalis: Driving business agility, resiliency and competitiveness with the cloud

The pace of innovation coming from Microsoft, and other public cloud providers, requires significant investment to transform innovations into solutions that drive business outcomes. This investment is critical for not only staying at the forefront of technology, it’s critical to remain competitive.

Working with a trusted, proven Microsoft partner, such as Logicalis can help you simplify the complexity and enable you to stay ahead of your competitors.

Logicalis brings a deep bench of expertise, experience and certifications with private, hosted, hybrid, and public cloud environments to ensure an agile, scalable and universally available environment, while meeting the strictest security standards—no matter where in the world you are.

Regardless of the size of your business or the stage you are at on your cloud transformation journey, without putting a laser focus on leveraging the latest technology to gain a competitive edge, you may be left behind.

Find out more about your cloud readiness, learn about migration paths or discover more about  Logicalis Cloud Solutions.

Jon Groves is CEO of Logicalis US.