Digital Transformation
Digital transformation is when an organization takes advantage of new technologies to redesign and redefine relationships with their customers, employees, and partners. Digital transformation for business covers everything from modernizing applications and creating new business models to building new products and services for customers. Organizations choose digital transformation frameworks as a way to reimagine themselves staying competitive in their respective businesses and industries. Learn more about the Anthos modernization platform, integrated open source cloud ecosystems, and the role both can play in digital transformation.
Digital Transformation Defined
Digital transformation uses modern digital technologies—including all types of public, private, and hybrid cloud platforms—to create or modify business processes, culture, and customer experiences to meet changing business and market dynamics.
Digital transformation drives foundational change in how an organization operates, optimizes internal resources, and delivers value to customers. Cloud technologies provide the foundation for becoming more agile, collaborative, and customer focused.
We are living in a world in continuous evolution. All companies need to drive their activity to new forms of technology. This is why digital transformation becomes a means of survival. In this revolution, cloud computing has a key role—it becomes the catalyst for this transformation. Nowadays, every company measures their performance through customer experience. A cloud-enabled and cloud-delivered business model supports organizations to adopt newer channels to offer high-level customer experience by differentiating its strategy and solutions over the current market competitors.
Digital transformation is what propels businesses and industries forward. Organizations of all sizes—from startups to global enterprises—choose digital transformation not only to make scaled improvements, but also to drive significant change and fully embrace the digital age. It requires a strong commitment from both businesses and IT teams, as well as a willingness to support the resulting changes.
The Journey to Digital Transformation Incorporates:
- Flexible technology to build, deploy, and manage applications more quickly in the cloud
- Experimentation to embrace new ideas and gain new insights on customer and market demands
- Measurement of experimentation results with data analysis to guide decision-making
- Collaboration across organizational boundaries with tools for quick knowledge sharing
- Customer focus and data analysis to deliver greater value to customers
- Agility to scale and accelerate without hesitation to succeed in the digital age
Related Products and Services
Google Cloud can help organizations take advantage of advances Google has made in AI and machine learning. Anthos supports a global-scale distributed infrastructure with the flexibility to modernize applications and build, run, and manage workloads within data centers—and on Google Cloud or other cloud providers—without making changes. The Google integrated open source ecosystem brings the best of open source to Google Cloud by making it even more accessible with a cloud-native experience.
Cloud Computing Overview
Cloud computing refers to the process of maintenance, storage, management, processing, analytics, and security of data by exploiting a network of Internet-based servers. Data is not saved on physical devices, but in the cloud. This helps businesses to better manage the administration, to streamline processes, improve productivity, optimize costs, and enhance customer digital experience.
Types of Cloud Computing
The cloud consists of three types of services:
● Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
In this option, a third-party cloud provider hosts software applications and provides them on demand to customers all over the world. Some examples of SaaS are Google Apps, Dropbox, BigCommerce, Hubspot, and so on.
● Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
In the second option, third-party providers deliver software and hardware tools, operating environments, databases, or computing platforms that are conceived to develop Internet applications. Some examples are Windows Azure, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Heroku, GCP, etc.
● Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
The last option consists of a third-party vendor which offers access to computing resources such as storage, data centre space, security, scaling, network components, or servers. Some examples are Digital Ocean, Rackspace, etc.
Cloud Computing Empowers Digital Business Transformation
In order to be competitive and to bring added value to the company, each company should embrace the digital transformation process when required, to upgrade their old IT infrastructure into a new one. Beyond adopting cloud solutions, a company should integrate new forms of technologies that speed up, automate, and improve business—such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Big Data Analytics, and the Internet of Things (IoT), etc. Considering that these technologies require heavy computational power and storage space, Cloud Computing comes as a solution to integrate these technologies.
Cloud Computing Benefits
- Flexibility of the organization’s management and development—mainly if it is in continuous change. Cloud computing allows companies to save costs by not investing in setting up and maintaining IT resources in-house.
- Cost-effectiveness: Cloud solutions are adaptable and tailor-made to business requirements. They provide a scalable framework model wherein businesses need to pay only for the used services. In this case, a company can choose a cheaper solution without the need to set up and maintain an expensive IT infrastructure.
- Security: Any data or personal information stored in-house can be subjected to security breaches such as cyber-attacks and cyber threats. Cloud hosting instead is able to store multiple backups of data in a distributed system. So, even if one security node goes down, the data stored in the other ones are not damaged.
- Parallel collaboration is possible with cloud solution infrastructure, which allows people to collaborate at the same level without hierarchy, top-down, or bottom-up communication. Different teams can work together and have access to the same data even remotely by facilitating daily tasks and saving time.
As a consequence of the world’s digitalization, customer behavior is changing too. This is why companies need to evolve and adapt to this digital environment.
Companies should exploit the advantages of cloud computing to set up robust digital transformation frameworks. Cloud enables innovation by giving a compatible set of APIs (Application Programming Interface) for developers.
Cloud provides analytics, functional programming, and low-code platforms. It could be essential for informed decision-making. This enables a company to launch enterprise-ready products rapidly. Digital transformation is crucial for making the difference in the competitive scenario, for enhancing customer experience and usability, and for innovating the company itself by increasing business value.
Towards a Hybrid Cloud
Companies are switching the current public cloud model to a new one. They are adopting a hybrid cloud composed of a mix of private and public cloud. This form enables organizations to achieve regulatory compliance, ensure data supremacy, cost optimization, and reinforce data security. Hybrid cloud is able to speed up apps and services delivery. In this way, businesses can combine on-premise systems with an external cloud services provider to get better efficiency and operational performance. Moreover, customers can manage applications both on-premise and in the public cloud.
Aiming to become agile with the new technologies’ integration should be a company priority in this new digital era. It can be possible by migrating to the cloud environment. Being in the cloud means achieving embedded connectivity and intelligence, making smart operations’ interoperability possible, and building a reliable infrastructure for digital services connected to the cloud.
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