Earn the rewards of digital transformation with cloud data management

The past few years have seen many organisations embark on their digital transformation journey, with organisations looking to move their systems onto third platform technologies, such as mobile computing, social media, big data & analytics and the cloud. According to a 2018 Frost & Sullivan report, close to 40% of organisations across Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore have begun their IoT journey. The same study showed that 43% of Singapore enterprises surveyed have carried out IoT proofs of concept or having existing IoT implementations in place.

Many of these digitally transforming organisations run into a common problem - recovery downtime. The 2019 Veeam Cloud Data Management Report surveyed more than 1,500 senior business and IT leaders and found that 73% of respondents report an ‘Availability Gap’ (the gap between users’ demand for uninterrupted access to data and services and what businesses and IT can deliver). This ‘Availability Gap’ costs organisations over US$20m each year in lost revenue and productivity, and also affects customer confidence.

However, the report also highlights that organisations are already looking to minimise downtime and maximise what digital transformation can do for them by employing Cloud Data Management and leveraging the power of data. These organisations that employ Cloud Data Management manage their data to ensure that their data learns to respond instantly and appropriately to what actually happens anywhere across the enterprise infrastructure.

Amongst these organisations, we found that the most successful businesses have four common core attributes that drives success. Keeping APAC organisations in mind, here is my take on these four attributes:

Cloud
The use of the cloud data management provides a key advantage over on-premise data storage and management- physical accessibility. Successful organisations recognise the advantages of a cloud-based approach, which is more reliable, flexible, secure and incurs lower costs. As multi-cloud becomes the norm for most enterprises across Asia Pacific, it is important for organisations to have future-proof cloud plans to properly reap the benefits of delivering intelligent data management.

Culture
Organisations need to create a culture that is adaptable and receptive to new technologies, for its employees to evolve with the organisation. Culture and talent management has become critical to organisations, as a company’s culture may enable cloud data management, or may also end up impeding the progress of a company.

Confidence
As Asia Pacific companies are increasingly implementing the cloud, it is important that organisations create a sense of confidence in the business’ digital capabilities, built on a strong data foundation. Staff need to be confident in managing changing environments caused by the adoption of new technologies in order to properly reap the rewards of successful cloud data management.

Capabilities
Successful organisations know that in order to enhance their capabilities, they need to start upskilling their staff. In the Cloud Data Management report, nine in ten respondents agree that upskilling staff in digital skills will be vital to their organisation’s success in the next three years. However, we have seen that time and budget are the limiting factors in many organisations. The SolarWinds IT Trends Report 2019 found that over 80% of tech professionals in Singapore lack time or budget to train . Hence, organisations need to acknowledge these limitations and create time and space for their staff to upskill.

In Singapore, now is an excellent time for SMEs to embrace new technologies because the cloud has been made available to businesses of all sizes, when it was formerly exclusive to large companies with their comparatively bigger budgets. SME leaders here have demonstrated their understanding of how digital transformation can create value for their businesses – whether it is to engage customers, optimise operations, transform products or empower employees.

Organisational resources should be allocated to achieving business goals instead of dealing with complex technology. IoT implementation can be rather complex and spans multiple technologies, domains, and in many cases, multiple industries.

Therefore, it is important to leverage technology partners and their ecosystem of capabilities to reduce complexity whilst simplifying application development and delivery. A full IoT stack optimised for the intended connectivity type includes devices, connectivity and cloud platform.

The journey to adopting IoT is a long one, but it has been associated with better business outcomes and more substantial profits. Many enterprises in Singapore have already embarked on this journey and realised significant gains in their business performance. It is also important to understand that IoT should be outcome-focused, and a data-driven approach is crucial in ensuring successful IoT outcomes. With the above four core attributes and cloud data management, organisations will be able to ensure that they can leverage these new technologies in order to achieve success as an intelligent business.