Co-authored by: Mevlit Mustafa

Companies have underestimated the power of technology for many years, seeing IT as a supporting function rather than a driving function. In today’s world, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Technology is becoming or has already become the catalyst for business strategy, innovation, and transformation. With this, the boundary between business and technology is reducing and the expectations from IT are shifting.

With cloud technologies lowering the barrier to entry, providing highly scalable and resilient resources and offering managed services, start-up organizations have been able to exponentially expand while enterprise organizations have had to undergo comprehensive digital transformations to maintain their competitive advantage. This ultimately means a change in business strategy by incorporating a strong digital strategy. It becomes even more important given many start-up companies are earning a ‘Unicorn’ status ($1bn valuations) and resulting in market cannibalization because of their edge on incorporating cloud technologies in an agile environment.

While public cloud technologies have been around for the last 15 years or so, their uptake and true benefits have been realized within the last decade with significant changes on a very frequent basis. And since it is still an emerging technology, expert skills in this area are limited. On top of this, the push from management to move to the cloud quickly often results in poorly designed architectures with multiple security issues and non-optimal workloads, and organizational structure and ethos that hasn’t adapted to the agile and flexible ‘cloud way of things’. These factors, in turn, impact the overall business strategy.

We have the solution that we call Cloud Smart. Cloud Smart encompasses several focus areas to ensure organizations succeed in their digital transition initiatives.

1. Cloud Consultancy – Gaining a holistic view across your estate and continually identifying business problems that can be solved through the use of cloud technologies.
2. Cloud Labs – Providing customers with an environment to enable rapid prototyping and accelerate their digital strategy. We believe ‘Failing Fast and Failing Often’ is the best way to learn, succeed and be future-proof.
3. Cloud Native and DevOps – Optimizing lifecycle management and enabling secure deployment by adopting cloud-native services such as containerized workloads, serverless, and DevSecOps will significantly enhance the scale of release cycles with minimal errors and fast roll-back. It will also enhance customer experience and achieve an overall faster time to market.
4. Security by Design – Leveraging cloud-native and/or innovative technologies by industry-leading partners will ensure your environment and applications are secure.
5. Deeper Monitoring and Intelligent Operations – Through the use of monitoring tools and AIOps, Cloud Smart gains deep insight into the performance and metrics of workloads. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence operations and auto-healing capabilities enable the operations team to focus on critical tasks.
6. Cost Optimization – Providing FinOps capabilities will ensure that workloads are optimized to be cost-efficient while maintaining their flexibility, scalability, and high resiliency.

While the digital transformation journey looks different for every organization, Cloud Smart provides a one-stop cloud consultancy solution to help organizations identify different use cases to meet their business strategies through the use of cloud technologies. Cloud Smart enables businesses to formulate their cloud strategy coupled with value-added services that operate fast and improve the unit economics of the cloud. Teams across the business are empowered and enabled to participate and increase the efficiency of their digital strategy.

Without a digital transformation strategy, the business strategy for most organizations would be rendered impractical. This was apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic that many businesses were relying on technology not only to operate but also to provide services to their customers. Today, we live in a very different world and organizations have become completely reliant on technology to drive their businesses forward. And if there is a flaw in the digital strategy, the success of the business will suffer.