The rate at which organizations globally are embracing cloud to achieve business transformation through scalability and cost-effectiveness is increasing rapidly. According to forecasts by analysts, over 75% of enterprises will have shut down their traditional data centers in the next 10 years. This means that your business should have its nose buried in speeding up its path to cloud, right now, if it wants to keep pace with competition. However, considering the pace at which the marketplace is evolving, does your cloud adoption roadmap include all the components required to ensure future-readiness?

A cloud journey must go beyond the routine questions: private versus public versus hybrid deployment, refactoring legacy environments for cloud, non-disruptive migrations, governance issues, and metrics for success. To stay one turn ahead of change, far-sighted organizations must take an approach that allows them to easily integrate and leverage the latest technologies with their cloud implementations. This includes technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), automation, Blockchain, and Internet of Things (IoT). Without these capabilities integrated in cloud, organizations are headed for a technological cul-de-sac.

This implies opting for cloud implementations that connect every part of the organization, allowing business to generate, capture, share and analyze data that builds enterprise-wide insights and intelligence. This, in turn, drives precise decision-making, unlocks hidden value and stimulates unfettered innovation.  

In other words, businesses must leverage cloud for more than scalability and cost efficiencies. With the alignment of cloud strategy with emerging technologies, enterprises can differentiate themselves from the competition. For example:

• Embedding AI-powered Smart Search in your business transactions: A leading energy company leveraged AI and cognitive automation to enable a smart conversational assistant for its employees. This empowered the company with the ability to query and process millions of unstructured documents and extract relevant data, thus, enabling it to take better decisions.
• Triggering Industry 4.0 with IoT Cloud: A global engineering firm leveraged IoT Cloud services to build a platform that connects its factory with customers and suppliers. This platform enabled the company to optimize inventory and logistics, and enhance productivity and quality of its products – thus creating a ‘Smart Connected Factory’.

These examples illustrate how integrating new capabilities and technologies – AI, ML, Blockchain, IoT, etc. – into cloud environments enables organizations to drive additional value from their cloud applications (enterprise resource planning, enterprise performance management, supply chain management, human capital management, etc.).

With a cloud strategy tightly integrated with emerging technologies, organizations can empower customers, improve asset and employee productivity, enhance transparency across the value chain, and meet compliance requirements. 

The questions to ask are relatively simple: Will your cloud applications and processes easily integrate with advanced technologies? Will your cloud strategy accelerate your AI, AR, IoT and Blockchain vision?

If not, it may be best to take a pause and reconsider your options.