Unlock Digital Success with a Strategic Cloud Approach

To remain competitive and profitable in today’s evolving business landscape, digital transformation is crucial. Embracing the cloud is a major driver of this shift, with its impact on flexibility, collaboration and cost savings. Looking ahead, Gartner estimates that by 2025, over 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms. 

To navigate shifting customer expectations and market demands, businesses must invest in a well-defined cloud strategy, not only to enhance current processes but also to lay the groundwork for innovative new digital experiences. The right strategy can help organizations unlock the power of the cloud to scale their business and achieve operational efficiency. 

Let’s explore how a solid cloud strategy can accelerate your digital transformation journey while unlocking efficiency and business growth. 

The Value of Cloud Strategy 

A well-designed cloud strategy optimizes business outcomes including speed-to-market, resilience and agility. Your cloud strategy should modernize existing apps, support cloud-native development and ensure strong governance during data migration. 

• Modernization
  By modernizing their existing applications, businesses can provide better user experiences with reduced costs and increased security. 

• Cloud-Native Applications
  Through cloud-native development, businesses can adapt and scale to meet the demands of market needs and evolving customer expectations to deliver enhanced experiences. 

• Regulation
  Businesses can migrate critical applications to the cloud with complete visibility, without compromising regulatory data compliance. 

Elements of an Effective Cloud Strategy 

Cloud transformation is key to digital transformation. A strong cloud transformation strategy can help businesses increase efficiency and adapt to consumer expectations. An effective strategy includes five key elements. 

• Enhanced Scalability
  Scalability is a crucial benefit of the cloud. A scalable cloud solution helps IT teams quickly adjust to greater storage and performance needs. 

• Business Agility & Resilience
  An agile and resilient cloud solution helps businesses respond to customers’ evolving needs. It enables an organization to rapidly adapt to changing market scenarios and compete more effectively. 

• Operational Excellence
  An effective cloud strategy helps an enterprise identify operational risk, manage sudden demand spikes and address them quickly. 

• Cost Optimization
  Effective cloud cost optimization strategies lower reliance on on-premise servers, making the cloud a cost-effective choice in the long-term without impacting revenue. 

• Regulations & Governance
  A strong cloud strategy is critical to ensure data privacy and security are effectively managed as a business grows. 

How to Choose the Right Cloud Transformation Strategy 

To get the most value out of the cloud, it’s important that an organization’s cloud strategy align with its overarching business strategy. Consider these three steps before deciding which cloud strategy is the best fit. 

• Analyze
  Compare your current business model and strategy with the proposed cloud strategy to ensure it fits your business ecosystem. 

• Evaluate
  Consider the available resources in the cloud and determine which would advance your business strategy. Identify a technology architecture and technical partners that can offer the required capabilities. 

• Measure
  Define KPIs to measure how well the cloud strategy meets the company’s needs. Ensure the strategy supports long-term success. 

After aligning your cloud strategy with your business strategy, choose the best cloud architecture for your business. Your cloud strategy should help you unlock the digital capabilities required for growth. To ensure a seamless cloud strategy implementation: 

1. Identify gaps between your capabilities and those of your competitors and decide how you want to position your business in the market. 

2. Align business objectives with IT as all IT-related investments should create or optimize business value. 

3. Choose the right cloud hosting platform that is secure, cost-effective, stable, tech-compatible and allows for quick deployment and easy upgrades. 

4. Closely monitor and optimize system health and performance to avoid issue proliferation or major setbacks during cloud migration.  

5. Implement periodic data governance to simplify data collection, storage and use within the cloud. This maintains compliance and enables collaboration, even as the data landscape grows larger. 

6. Mitigate possible risks by proactively identifying security gaps with impact analysis. 

By following these practices, you can build a cloud-enabled business transformation strategy that unlocks efficiency and builds ROI. The right strategy can help build a cloud-based organizational structure that will support your business in its digital transformation journey – streamlining operations, increasing scalability and application speed, managing costs and opening up new business opportunities. 

Start Your Cloud Transformation with Material 

The cloud is pivotal to the future of business, and pinpointing the right cloud strategy is essential. With Material’s expert cloud engineers and consultants you can streamline your cloud adoption strategy across multi-cloud environments, ensuring fast, reliable and secure services. To learn more about we can help you begin your cloud transformation journey, get in touch with us today.