Improved agility and innovation prime motivators for adoption of cloud technology, say senior leaders at Deloitte

Enterprises have to be agile, get to market faster and more efficiently. In such a demanding business environment, enterprises are migrating their SAP workloads to cloud to enhance performance, simplify operations, and reduce costs.

The ‘Enterprise Transformation Series’, hosted in association with AWS, features experts who have helped enterprises undergo digital transformation by migrating their on-premise SAP workloads to the cloud.

In this episode, Anoop Nambiar, Partner, Deloitte, India and Anand Rajagopalan, Partner at Deloitte India spoke about how companies in today’s business environment have improved their agility and ability to innovate with the help of cloud technology, the best practices that help leverage the power of the cloud and more.

How digital transformation leads to faster ROI

Anand noted that the outlook of companies towards digital transformation with the help of cloud technology has drastically changed in a short span of time. “Earlier, digital was a longer journey that used to be evaluated for its potential before taking the leap. Today, a process that normally took 3-4 years now takes 6-7 months,” he said, adding companies are realising how cloud technology can help them to be more agile, innovative and provide a better customer experience. “It (cloud technology) allows not only for ease in infrastructure management, it also allows for the experimentation of new Proof Of Concept (PoC) of new business models, and scale up and scale down data and compute infrastructure in accordance with the demands.”

Apart from a reduction in total cost of operations, Anand also mentioned that there are tools and accelerators that make the process of protecting operations against data loss, cyberthreats and other disruptors much more seamless and faster.

For enterprises operating in today’s business environment, Anoop noted that speed-to-market is key. “Medium-sized programmes used to take a long time to get launched as they were dependent on securing the right program infrastructure and licences,” he said. With cloud technology, Anoop said, these concerns do not come into the picture, and the same solution can be made operational in a week or a few days.

When it comes to scaling operations across geographical boundaries, Anoop added that the cloud is truly a democratic force. He cited a hypothetical example of a company in one country acquiring a company in Brazil. “You are talking about two enterprises with vastly different cultures. I have seen companies that try to merge without checking if they are the right fit, and they flounder. But with cloud, if both have the same cloud provider, that is all that is needed to carry out the transformation,” he explained.

A systematic approach essential for leveraging the benefits of the cloud

Anand also outlined that while awareness and willingness to explore cloud technology have increased in recent times, many companies are not able to scale up their use of cloud beyond the PoC stage. He outlined how Deloitte closely works with businesses to help them see the benefits of cloud technology.

“We first understand their business needs, requirements, and goals, and then work backwards towards developing solutions for specific business cases that can leverage cloud technology,” he said, adding that irrespective of time taken, clients come out on the other side, having learnt some key lessons about the cloud and are able to confidently harness this technology for the future.

Data management foundational to securing business insights

For Anoop, data management is central to the growth process of an enterprise as it requires understanding which data is critical to the functioning of an organisation. This data can then be managed, governed and analysed to secure the business insights crucial for the growth of an organisation.

Anand also spoke about the various ways in which cloud service providers such as AWS are helping organisations to gain these insights through unorganised data by using data lakes, machine learning models and others.

Click here to watch the video.