Cloud can help relieve the digital pressure on CIO´s

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The past twelve months have shown enterprises the vital role technology now plays in delivering new business outcomes and inspiring new operating models. Increased demand for cloud transformation services, coupled with data analytics, innovation, customer experience and applied intelligence, puts massive pressure on CIOs. It’s a necessity to come up with solutions that not only make the digital dream a reality but attract a new generation of customers and increase competitive edge.

Getting cloud right

According to IDC, enterprises will increasingly implement scalable and flexible architectures built on cloud-centric technologies in the future of digital infrastructure. By 2024, the analyst firm predicts that 75% of enterprises will prioritize infrastructure agility and operational efficiency, leading to a fivefold increase in the adoption of cloud-native architectures for core business applications.

An agile, business-outcomes-oriented and well-thought-out cloud roadmap has never been more critical as the cloud establishes itself as the foundation of digital transformation. Furthermore, as enterprises increase their investments in the cloud, the business impact of a cloud strategy is critical to growing a business’s competitive edge and bottom line.

Cloud, it must be remembered, is not a specific technology platform or a destination. Neither is it a tick-box exercise. Instead, the cloud demands commitment and continuous monitoring and tweaking to deliver on its promise of flexibility, scalability, and increased productivity through agile and codification practices.

A CIO’s priority list

Today, CIOs have three key topics at the head of their agendas: innovation, resilience in dealing with disruption, and digital transformation. Each comes with its own unique set of challenges.

One focus of the CIO across all these is linking business agility and business outcomes. Other vital considerations throw a ring around new skills, different ways of collaboration and transparent communication. Innovation, resilience and transformation all require cultural change. Effectively managing the seismic changes that cloud services bring is crucial to their successful adoption across the organization and to drive new business outcomes.

Many enterprises surprisingly don’t consider the new skills involved in moving to the cloud or for performing greenfield, cloud-native development. Given the current skills drought, a CIO would be foolish not to run a skills-gap assessment. One way to bridge the skills gap is to work with a trusted and experienced cloud managed service provider (MSP).

MSPs can also help CIOs stay on top of new technologies and value creation. For example, the industry moves rapidly towards the intelligent cloud with emerging applications incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) through cross-functional collaboration mindsets.