Leveraging the Cloud to Achieve Digital Transformation

To achieve true digital transformation, companies have to do more than just use technology. After all, what company isn’t using technology these days? Rather, digital transformation requires a radical, strategic rethinking of the ways in which technology is integrated throughout the organization and its processes.  Increasingly, that means leveraging the cloud.

More specifically, companies need a way to run, manage, connect and secure any of their applications—both existing apps and apps that will be developed over time–in the cloud. This provides the kind of flexibility and agility that companies need in order to turn on a dime in response to new customer and market demands.

For many companies, it makes the most sense to do this in a hybrid cloud environment, utilizing both private and public platforms. In this model, companies can host what makes sense on-premises (depending on factors such as sensitivity of data, regulatory compliance mandates, in-house skill sets, IT resources, and so on) while still taking advantage of the private cloud. This requires virtualization technology that will provide workload portability while taking advantage of existing skill sets and tools, as well as a cloud management platform that enables companies to securely connect, manage and have clear visibility into what will be, in essence, multiple clouds.

Also key to digital transformation is the ability to provide users with a “digital workspace.” This is about much more than just access: It’s about the ability for companies to quickly and efficiently develop new business models and user experiences with mobile in mind from the ground up. This is a complicated endeavor, but virtualization and cloud technology can ease not only development, but also application access and management, endpoint management, and security centralization.

The term “digital transformation” is being thrown around a lot lately, but it’s really about enabling visibility into the entire organization, and providing a means for companies to conceive of, develop, implement and manage applications and services at the speed of the digital economy.

This guest blog is part of a Channel Futures sponsorship.