A successfully digital transformation requires a well-planned strategy and execution process, spanning across all IT enterprises and businesses. Cloud strategies need to lay a strong technical foundation for your organization and align well with business objectives. It is better for measurable results and innovative features if a cross-company effort instigates the digital transformation strategies.
Microsoft is an industry leader when it comes to cloud-first strategy. It has consistent hybrid offerings, data center locations spread across the globe, and a wide-ranging AI functionality. Azure offers innovative tools, services, and marketplace solutions that help businesses deploy, monitor, and manage business-critical applications. In addition, its power-packed compliance, security, and big data solutions reap myriads of benefits for IT organizations.
Here’s how you can implement a successful digital transformation with Microsoft Azure:
Strategies for a Successful Digital Transformation with Azure:
1. Align technology to Digital Transformation
IT leaders need to equip their business with the right technology to prepare for the future. You cannot develop your own AI, employ hyper-scale compute in your data center, or build platforms for neural networks. For digital transformation, businesses will need a powerful cloud strategy.
With Microsoft Azure, you can reduce operational overhead, get cost advantages, and access the latest innovative technologies consistently.
2. Build a solid foundation
Azure services provide the much-needed innovation for organizational digital transformation. If you have just begun the digital transformation journey, Azure IaaS helps you run your VMs with high efficiency and reduced operational overheads. It lays a strong foundation for advanced functionalities and abilities. Moreover, it offers modern analytics-based threat protection services to make your cloud environment more secure.
By the same token, if you are already using IaaS, Microsoft Azure further adds value to the platform. It efficiently optimizes your IaaS with new service models like on-demand compute and capability. As a result, businesses can entirely transform their cloud DR (Disaster Recovery) by dismantling their n-tier applications and using PaaS services.
Lastly, suppose you are already using IaaS and PaaS. In that case, Microsoft Azure further offers innovative data and analytics tools to integrate your disparate repositories in one place and drill them down for deeper insights. Leveraging these analytics tools will help you get historical insights along with realistic predictions for the future. Enhance customer experiences by leveraging bot technologies that learn, analyze, provide insights and reduce operational overheads. Also, Azure helps you build innovative applications and adopt smarter IoT devices.
3. Cross-functional participation of teams
Company-wide, broad participation is often underestimated. There are many cases where IT teams have built cloud solutions on Microsoft Azure and expected all business teams to migrate their workloads right away, thereby causing failure. Cross-functional, enterprise-wide participation must be deeply rooted from the beginning.
Cloud solutions cannot be built in isolation. All teams across the company- such as IT infrastructure, business units, DevOps teams, IT applications, and security teams need to participate in the strategy. Forming a siloed cloud strategy and then transferring it onto the next team often leads to failure.
4. Hybrid architectures
Today, cloud providers are providing businesses with modern offerings, matured technologies, and developed competencies. In addition, cross-industry, prominent leaders like Microsoft Azure offer unique value and high efficiencies to empower business workflows and IT objectives.
New open standards are now allowing seamless access to data along with cloud interoperability. Many workloads essentially require private clouds, which rely on hybrid architecture. For this, Microsoft Azure provides a strong, well-strategized foundation.
5. Integration of technology
Cloud providers have matured rapidly in this digital era. And that has completely turned the tables for IT organizations and their journey to transform digitally. Previously, businesses were merely brokering services from distinct internal and external sources or delivering technology.
Today, traditional IT notions need to be re-worked, where the main focus should be on integrating and aligning technologies rather than just emphasizing infrastructure. IT teams can offload myriads of their tasks onto Microsoft Azure.
6. Get started
While many perceive that it is better to delay cloud migration until they form full strategy, it is highly recommended to shift business workloads to cloud immediately. Moving to cloud is not a one-time execution, rather a technical journey. Thus, businesses need to identify opportunities for significant value at that moment while also simultaneously building and brainstorming long-term strategies with phased milestones.
To conclude, it is better NOT to wait to entirely craft the cloud strategy and then move to cloud. Instead, get started, make the first move, and be open to new technologies and notions in parallel.
7. Leveraging other technologies
No doubt cloud lays a strong foundation for digital business, but leveraging other technologies can really bring advantage to the business for complete transformation. Analytics of On-prem and public cloud data can extract key business-critical metrics and provide invaluable insights into customer behavior and patterns. With these insights, you will be able to provide successful offerings.
Next, digital experience solutions that employ social and mobile-friendly environments are really high-in-trend right now. These solutions build a powerful and personalized customer intimacy.
Lastly, strong security directives offer data protection, confidentiality and retain IT integrity of organizations. All of these technologies together can form a successful pathway for you to gain a competitive edge in the long run.
8. Management and Governance
For complete digitalization, accessing cloud data from multiple warehouses, endpoints, and applications is a must. But with this, there arise security concerns. Therefore, data protection has to be one of the topmost priorities for companies, and it is vital to leverage industry’s best techniques and guidelines for data governance in the cloud.
Not just that, businesses also need to automate IT service management (ITSM) processes with employment of sufficient staff in the program office. These personnel and security protocols will streamline business workflows and systematize the cloud into seamless IT and business operations. Microsoft Azure has offerings and functionalities to make this possible.
How Azure helps you achieve core business goals
As you get started, your business identity and data center are significantly extended to Microsoft Azure. Its offerings, functionalities, and innovation are available to leverage at your own pace no matter your current stage in the digital transformation process.