The Art and Science of Cloud Transformation

Enterprises see how cloud will transform pieces of their business but find it harder to envisage the execution of the cloud-led transformation of their entire value chain driven from the core. Our own conversations with leaders, from the Global 2000 companies, confirm this. They know transformation must emanate from the core, and that their cloud journey will have to consider the advantage from their existing IT, as they build up new digital capabilities to work in tandem with the legacy. The target end-state of the journey is a hybrid landscape orchestrated to operate harmoniously – getting more from all the investments already made, while simultaneously getting new value from new digital capabilities.

The digital journey that enterprises undertake must manage the disruption of existing business practices while acting on new growth opportunities. At the same time, they must ensure a high level of process efficiency to ensure smooth business operations. Cloud and a host of other technologies such as big data, AI, IoT, and blockchain have emboldened enterprises to seek more transformative gains for their business. These technologies can bring about disruptive changes to the business, and cloud is the key enabler that propels the adoption of these disruptive technologies.

 This entails getting the art and science of cloud transformation right. The science of the transformation lies in rejuvenating the core through consolidation and modernization of data centers, applications, ERPs, and other COTS products in ways that enable cost take out, create flexibility and mitigate technical risk. The science also plays out in simultaneously building for the future with digital investments for data monetization, APIs, AI- and ML-driven systems.

The art lies in leveraging this landscape and a rich ecosystem of partners to orchestrate the entire value chain and create blueprints for new solutions and experiences that tackle hard problems that plague industries. It is about expertly orchestrating the technology landscape below the cloud, to drive innovation, agility, and resilience with business solutions above the cloud.

 At Infosys, we do this by driving a three-pronged cloud strategy that leverages:

 Hybrid environment – We abstract the complexity and clearly outline the opportunities and challenges that come from choices that combine public cloud extending to the private cloud and Edge, private cloud extending to public clouds and containers as the primary platform for managing the hybrid landscape including virtual machines. We ensure the chosen path considers your applications and data centers as well. Our recommendation to you ensures effective management of core enterprise workloads, reliability, and up-time of services, maintenance of open-standards in a multi-cloud environment, easy migration of solutions and seamless connect with emerging technologies, while assuring deeply integrated security.

Transformation platforms – To enable change at scale and speed, at a fraction of the cost you might expect, we leverage our time-tested platforms that can help create, among several competencies, cloud-first capabilities to store and analyze operational data to drive exponential efficiencies, forecast business eventualities, drive insights from real-time customer data streams and power smart automation.

Business solutions – This is where the very purpose of cloud-powered transformation manifests. The underlying distributed infrastructure and platform layers power the creation of business solutions that are both reusable and easily deployed to plug and play. These solutions enable businesses to join the dots in new inventive ways that make never-before solutions like digital asset management, telco-on-tap, and virtual CFO possible. They often serve to orchestrate not just technology capabilities but the business ecosystem to solve difficult problems.

Digital transformation is not just about modernization. It is about making fundamental changes in an organization so that it can deliver greater value to both its employees and customers. It must also transform companies into innovative organizations that are unafraid to experiment, learn fast and scale up ideas’ worth pursuing. Migrating legacy on-premises systems to the cloud is only the first step to this journey. As enterprises shift their expectations towards business outcomes, choosing the right partner is the real game changer!