The cloud is a digital transformation and innovation catalyst. Adopting it unlocks the ability to increase development speed and promises a near-limitless scale. Moreover, it can improve almost every aspect of an organisation’s products, services or processes.
But as with all technologies, challenges come with opportunities, so what are the trends organisations should keep in mind as they look to build resilience for the future through their cloud strategies?
Keep up with the leaders
McKinsey Digital found that cloud technologies can accelerate time to market by 90%, reducing the time for adding new features, the risk of an outage and saving costs on capacity utilisation. With the cloud, companies do not need significant capital expenses and they minimise the risk of overprovisioning equipment that will not be utilised.
Furthermore, a detailed review of cloud cost-optimisation levers and value-oriented business use cases predicts that Fortune 500 companies can earn around $1 trillion by adopting cloud technology. As a result, nine out of 10 organisations have “developing a comprehensive cloud strategy” on their high or critical priority list for the next year.
Dell Technologies takes these benefits further with its flexible APEX Flex on Demand solution. It enables customised hardware and software configurations, and set “Committed” and “Buffer Capacity” upfront. Clients pay only for what they use, with a single billing rate that helps accurately predict future costs.
But companies should prepare carefully for adopting the cloud. Sustainable implementation requires knowledge of an organisation’s operations and a clear view of how cloud technology will affect them. In addition, cloud uptake requires a collaborative approach involving the entire company, not just its leadership, taking all the business priorities into account.
As outlined in Dell Technologies’ Cloud and Clear podcast, relying exclusively on the public cloud might raise concerns about data security, control and compliance, non-transparent pricing and data gravity that entails increased complexity. It is why many companies choose a hybrid approach to their IT infrastructure. Microsoft research found that 86% of all respondents plan to increase investment in hybrid or multi-cloud environments, and 95% say those technologies have already been critical to their success.
Organisations should examine how they take advantage of cloud-based services and cloud-like operating models for on-premises infrastructure, thereby preserving vital liquidity. Equally important is ensuring infrastructure is deployed in such a way as to optimise for productivity and security. These two factors can have a direct impact on the bottom line.
At Dell Technologies, we communicate with our customers to ensure a high-quality adoption of hybrid and multi-cloud technology. Our comprehensive approach also facilitates the engagement of relevant people and processes to build an appropriate ecosystem for all sized businesses. It ensures reduced disruption and guarantees that all data is maintained as it is moved across the infrastructure and stored safely.
Join the innovators
According to the McKinsey Technology Trends Outlook 2022, cloud and Edge computing development will be one of the key tech trends in the upcoming years. Networks of the future will consist of traditional cloud data centres and a variety of computational resources located at the Edge.
Edge computing, enabled by cloud technology, is becoming an operational necessity for many organisations, providing flexibility to achieve greater data sovereignty, autonomy, security and latency while unlocking various use cases that rely on real-time data processing driven by 5G. This will impact almost all industries, from telecommunications and financial services to manufacturing, retail and healthcare.
IDC also found that worldwide spending on Edge computing is expected at $176 billion this year, an increase of 14.8% over 2021. Enterprise and service provider spending on hardware, software, and services for Edge solutions is also forecast to reach nearly $274 billion by 2025.
In addition, Gartner forecasts that the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices will triple from 2020 to 2030, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 11%. The data these devices produce will grow even faster due to larger data streams and increases in video resolution. It will be created and possibly stored, processed, analysed and destroyed without ever being collected in a data centre or the cloud.
These requirements mean enterprises should extend their data management strategies and capabilities by allocating personnel to address Edge data requirements.
Unlock the future
In the future, the development of cloud and Edge computing will bring about a new major economic opportunity for society. In the Cloud and Clear podcast, Dell Technologies’ Strategic Propositions Global Lead, Margarete McGrath talked about the progression of the economy from the Information age towards the “Partnership” or “Ecosystem age”.
The cloud already facilitates better and easier collaboration between companies that was not possible before, enabling agility and speed so businesses can share data, adapt to one another and work together in ways that would have previously been impossible. Soon enough, the concept of “co-opetition” rather than competition will shape the face of our economy. As a result, organisations will reap the most significant benefits and achieve optimal functioning through collaboration enabled by the cloud.
Ecosystems will be built via partnerships between companies where each collaborator brings a unique set of valuable assets to the table. Working together, they enable a product that satisfies the modern customer, who expects more than just a product but an “outcome”. A good example is electric vehicles, which Dell Technologies works on in collaboration with other partners.
Making Progress
The future of technology is in the cloud. Many recent technologies, such as blockchain, big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence and edge computing, can only exist in a meaningful way on the cloud.
However, ensuring a sustainable, future-proof cloud adoption strategy is not a trivial task. Organisations need a trusted partner and expert to assist them along the way. Dell Technologies offers hybrid and multi-cloud solutions to best support this, with capabilities for bespoke solutions that best suit each company’s business priorities.
Find out more about our cloud solutions here or join our Regional Roundtables: Hybrid Cloud, Your Way at Microsoft Offices across the UK.
