Business transformation – turning IT from a money pit into a money maker

Despite the growing number of opportunities for business transformation, 37 percent of organisations still dedicate the majority of their IT budget to ongoing maintenance and management.

This includes tasks such as:

• Maintaining uptime and availability
• Applying upgrades, fixes, and patches
• Ensuring security

But businesses are increasingly beginning to recognise that this DIY approach to IT is slowing down their digital transformation efforts. From small organisations to established enterprises, digital transformation is the key to generating new revenue and improving existing business models.

But how can you ensure that your IT keeps up with your business transformation strategy?

Hyperscaling your business transformation

New technologies have been developing at a significant rate over the last five years. This is due in no small part to the maturity of cloud computing. With the adoption of hyperscale cloud services such as Microsoft Azure increasing each year, companies now have the opportunity to transform their traditional, money-draining infrastructure.

For this reason, your IT should no longer restrict your ability to innovate. Using the hyperscale cloud, you can overcome common business transformation challenges, such as cost and scalability, by changing the way you access and consume IT resources.

Let’s take a look at four compelling reasons the hyperscale cloud is the lynchpin to a successful digital transformation.

1. Go beyond the limits of your data centre

The hyperscale cloud removes the barriers to innovation. As IoT, Big Data analytics, machine learning and AI become a reality, competitive businesses need to re-engineer their processes to get the most from these new technologies.

The hyperscale cloud provides the scale, speed and agility to build new capabilities from scratch. It was built to support digital initiatives throughout their lifecycle, without the need to adapt existing technologies.

The Internet of things

Nearly one in four businesses in the cloud use IoT services. With internet-connected devices producing such a vast amount of data, the hyperscale cloud can give your business the flexibility to scale your network as and when needed.

Services such as Azure’s IoT hub accelerate the deployment and management of IoT networks, so you don’t have to spend huge amounts of capital, time and effort doing it in-house.

Big Data analytics

Big Data is the fuel for intelligent decision-making in the enterprise. With 53 percent of companies adopting Big Data analytics as part of their business transformation, building on the right platform is key.

Traditional data warehouses fail to handle continuous streams of real-time data. However, the hyperscale cloud’s near-infinite scalability makes it the perfect environment for Big Data analytics. The sheer quantity of enterprise data means it’s difficult for legacy datacentres to scale at the same rate, leading to far more inferior data insights.

AI and machine learning

With so much data to process and analyse, even the largest Data Science teams will struggle to keep up. That’s where machine learning and AI come into the picture. For tasks that require a high volume of work, AI can replace the need for human input.

But of course, the best AI services are incredibly resource-intensive. As with Big Data and IoT, the hyperscale cloud makes it much easier to scale, maintain and advance your company’s AI capabilities. Most hyperscale cloud providers offer their own machine learning capabilities as a service, making it possible to access cutting-edge insights on-demand.

2. Only pay for what you use

If you’re part of the 37 percent of companies who spend their IT budget on data centre maintenance and management, you’re probably used to overprovisioning hardware. While it’s always been a failsafe way to avoid resource scarcity, it’s also holding back your business transformation efforts.

In the hyperscale cloud, you don’t need to worry about fluctuating workload demands. If your infrastructure reaches capacity, you can provision new servers on-demand and only pay for the resources you use.

What’s more, hyperscale PaaS (platform-as-a-service) capabilities make it easier to access the exact resources you need. The days of buying, licensing, provisioning and managing your own servers are over, with high-density compute nodes, database platforms and Big Data analytics platforms all available as consumable services.

3. Access sophisticated, enterprise-grade platforms

Speaking of PaaS, these pre-built services allow companies to test or realise business transformation ideas at the drop of a hat. With time to value such an important metric in modern business, the hyperscale cloud takes you from concept to service more rapidly than ever before.

PaaS is particularly useful in the development and deployment of new services, eliminating the need for extra resources. With built-in development tools, teams can focus on delivering new, transformative applications and react to new opportunities as soon as they arise. Examples include:

• Replacing call centres with chat bots
• Using machine learning for automated customer interaction
• Real-time translation tools

4. Take infrastructure security to the next level

As businesses rush to embrace game-changing technological trends, infrastructure security is often an afterthought. But with 60 percent of hacked companies going out of business after 6 months, it’s crucial you make it the cornerstone of new innovations.

The hyperscale cloud provides access to world-class security measures that most companies would never be able to replicate on-premise. Microsoft is a leader in this space, investing $1 billion in public cloud security this year.

As part of this investment, Azure undergoes continuous ethical hacking to test security robustness and the company has even laid its own transatlantic internet cable to minimise downtime and improve disaster recovery.

Give your business room to grow

Growth tops the list of business priorities in 2018, with 58 percent of CEOs citing it as a major reason for business transformation. For companies looking to gain a competitive edge in their market, the hyperscale cloud offers the perfect environment for unbridled innovation and exploration.

With 45 percent of companies running applications in Azure, your competitors know this already. So, don’t let your IT team talk you out of a migration to Azure. Move to the hyperscale cloud and experience the power of true innovation.