Cloud has undoubtedly become a key component of successful business in recent years, especially when you consider the race to digitally transform. Across the globe, companies are moving their applications and services to the cloud and are consequently reaping the benefits of lower capex and opex as a result.

However, with this process, cloud migration is only a beginning for any organization’s digital transformation (DX) journey. If harnessed correctly, cloud is a pillar of innovation for DX, and can be a driving force for new business models and use cases that – even a few years ago – weren’t possible. No one knows this better than devops teams; these teams hold the line when it comes to continuous delivery and deployment, and it therefore stands to reason that devops play a crucial role in the digital transformation journey. In practice however, the decision makers in charge of cloud strategies are rarely those in the bowels of the ship.

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The financial services industry is experiencing a period of dramatic change as a result of the growth in digitalization and its effect on customer behavior. In an emerging landscape made up of cryptocurrencies, frictionless trading, and consolidated marketplace lending, traditional banks have found themselves shaken by the introduction of new, disruptive, digitally-native and mobile-first brands.

With a reputation as being somewhat conservative and slow to innovate, many financial service providers are now modernizing and improving their systems, transforming their new business models and technologies in an effort to stay ahead of the more agile challengers snapping at their heels.

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The EU General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, came into force on May 25. With every organization with customers and suppliers in the European Union now accountable for the way in which they handle or process personal data, much work has been done to ensure compliance by the deadline. As a result, all levels of a business are now concentrated on meeting the requirements of the new regulation, throwing the issue of data protection into focus like never before.

When you consider how big and complex IT networks have become in recent times, however, it has become almost impossible to detect just when and how a security breach or network failure might occur. Unsurprisingly, network security and information assurance are crucial to GDPR compliance, with the regulation stating that measures must be put in place to mitigate the risk associated with assuring information integrity and availability in the face of threats such as malicious code or distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

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With budgets and resources becoming ever tighter, the health care industry, in common with many others, is undergoing a significant digital transformation. Advances in digital technology are proving to be a great benefit, enabling health care providers to do more with less.

The ability to securely access a patient’s Electronic Medical Records (EMR) and their diagnostic test results in real time, from virtually any device, regardless of location, is now largely taken for granted. Not only does it improve a health care provider’s operational efficiency, but it can also allow for more accurate diagnoses and inform a patient’s ongoing treatment plan. Likewise, the introduction of e-prescriptions, and almost ubiquitous Wi-Fi connectivity throughout hospitals and doctors’ surgeries, have reduced the volume of administrative tasks, allowing frontline operatives to concentrate more on their primary task of delivering high-quality health care to their patients.

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Fundamental to harnessing the full potential of the Internet of Things (IoT) is the need for decisions to be made in real time, and it’s in addressing this that discussions have turned to the subject of edge computing over recent years.

Before the data generated by myriad of connected IoT devices is sent to the centralized cloud, edge computing sees it stored and processed locally, in distributed micro-clouds at the edge of the network, closer to where the devices are placed, and the data produced. Doing so cuts down on the need for data traffic to be back-hauled to and from a remote data center, thus making it ideal for supporting the real time data delivery required by the IoT.

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With the amount of data in the world predicted to increase at least 50-fold between 2010 and 2020, how we store that data has come into sharp focus. Collecting large volumes of raw log data from multiple applications and infrastructure components and sending it to a central location for storage and processing, for example, increases the size and cost of storage. And as the volume of data grows and storage and processing costs increase dramatically, businesses risk undermining the advantages big data brings. Furthermore, the surging demand for data has environmental implications; by 2020, 12 percent of the world’s energy consumption will be taken by our digital ecosystem, and this is expected to grow annually at approximately 7 percent until 2030. 

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The amount of data being created today is expected to increase ten-fold in less than a decade, it’s also anticipated that enterprises will produce around 60% of global data by 2025[1]. However, while the amount of data may be growing exponentially, the intelligence gleaned from it is not. Instead, companies can be subject to a barrage of unstructured data delivered at high velocity from a variety of different sources with limited ability to convert it into actionable insight. As a result, enterprises risk useful information getting lost amidst the sheer volume of noise.

This is set to be further compounded by the widespread adoption of IoT technologies in both consumer and enterprise markets. The proliferation of IoT sensors, mobile devices and digital services, combined with advent in big data technologies and broadband networks increase the volume, velocity and variety of data traversing the connected world. This means that businesses that collect relevant data that flows through their corporate networks and the connected world are sitting on an abundance of data, which will only increase. Mission contextual analysis of this data can provide invaluable insight to corporations in a variety of areas and improve business outcomes. For example, gleaning insight into digital services performance, and customer experience, usage, and behavior, which in turn can be harnessed to drive efficiencies and revenue, improve the customer experience or digitally transform the business. But simply having access to big data is not enough. It is vital that enterprises have the right tools to convert this information into business insight, and ensure it is properly utilized to support both operations and the bottom line.

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There’s no doubt that digital transformation (DX) is revolutionizing the way we do business, and cloud computing serves as a key cog in the DX machine. Cloud’s elasticity can indeed help digital businesses communicate more rapidly and increase innovation. But to extract full value from the cloud, companies must make sure that they aren’t bringing the equivalent of a cutlass to a gun fight when it comes to migrating existing applications and accelerating software development.

Here is what I mean: many businesses start their migration journeys by lifting and shifting existing on-premises applications into the cloud, making few to no changes to the application itself.  But running such the same old monolithic application architectures in the cloud means that your applications aren’t built to maximize cloud benefits. Just the opposite: They often present scalability issues, increase cost and require time-consuming application support. Ultimately, this will erode DX strategies, which depend on modernizing, rapidly iterating, and scaling applications.

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Over recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has been a huge growth market. From consumer gadgets and wearables to connected cars and smart home devices, the proliferation has been rapid, and IHS predicts that the number of IoT devices globally will reach 30.7 billion by 2020 and 75.4 billion by 2025.

IoT is also beginning to touch all aspects of the enterprise. This will only fuel its growth as industry sectors from healthcare to manufacturing become more dependent on IoT communications to drive business processes and missions critical systems.

IoT is a key driver of the digital transformation (DX) that is taking place across industry sectors. As the demand for new digital and IoT services continues to grow, close monitoring and management of this transformation will be crucial ensure its success. The rise of IoT has been rapid and will continue to gather pace, to the point where we will soon see entirely new IT infrastructure emerge to support IoT applications and critical systems, spanning the edge, core, and cloud of the service delivery infrastructure.

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Most enterprises across the globe are currently at some stage of the digital transformation journey, and there is no doubt that cloud is a key driving factor. No sector is immune to the impact of digital transformation, particularly as the influx of digital and data-driven challengers shows no sign of abating and legacy businesses find themselves forced to modernize rapidly, sometimes just to maintain their competitive position.

Enterprises face myriad challenges when it comes to moving applications and data to the cloud. On the one hand, there is increasing pressure to reap the benefits of cloud services. These include the agility to increase infrastructure capacity with no additional capital expenses and to quickly deploy new services as mandated by the business needs. On the other hand, enterprises have legacy systems and applications that cannot be virtualized or migrated to the cloud. In addition, in many sectors, such as financial services, there is a raft of governance, compliance and regulatory (GRC) requirements that impact cloud strategy.

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In today’s data-driven economy, consumer expectations for services anywhere, anytime have led to a need for organizations to become more agile and increase their speed of deliver exponentially. Gone are the days when product and service updates were delivered on a monthly basis, instead we have reached a point where an environment of continuous development is becoming required to meet the ever-evolving needs of users.

+ Also on Network World: Digital transformation progress. Or not… +

There’s no doubt that digital transformation is a major driver in this change in development methodology, partly as a response to the threat posed by agile startups that are disrupting markets globally. Most organizations have begun their digital transformation journey, but for many it’s still in its infancy. However, there is no doubt that for enterprises across a wide range of sectors, multiple IT technologies, processes, applications, systems and protocols need to be adopted and updated on a regular basis in order for businesses to remain competitive.

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