An Integrated Platform in the Cloud: A Growing Trend

In the past three years, the business of enterprise cloud services has undergone astronomical growth all over the world. More and more companies are looking to cloud services to update, remain competitive, and improve their profitability without relying on physical servers or a significant investment in infrastructure.

This gained momentum in early 2020 with the COVID-19 health crisis, which forced companies to accelerate their digital transformation and turned the cloud into a vital tool for business continuity, remote work/learning, and customer engagement across different businesses.

Migrating to cloud platforms: Why is it a trend?

This growth can be explained: enterprises have understood this is not a workaround, but a change in paradigm that will bring about significant short-, medium- and long-term benefits, with technology as a core partner on the way towards more modern and competitive systems.

For companies, the key is to adopt cloud-native platforms, automate processes, have higher data visibility, be better prepared for contingencies, and gain greater business agility.

Optimizing costs is another benefit. Companies adopting cloud computing tools will see significant savings on their budgets. Using cloud solutions will reduce investments in capital goods (such as hardware, computers, data centers, maintenance, etc.), which involve down-payments and the assessment of their durability and their replacement and update costs.

Why? Because in the cloud, companies will only pay for what they use and the time they use it. Moreover, they will have access to tools, applications, or solutions they couldn't have dreamt of at a low and variable cost that is easy to schedule, enable and disable as needed.

Also, adopting the public cloud usually reduces the carbon footprint, which represents an essential element for businesses' environmental and sustainability strategies: cloud infrastructure can be up to three or four times more energy efficient.

The sky is the limit for technology

The potential of cloud services has no limits. The ones presently offered to make it possible to gather data management, application development, and automation in a unified environment. And they include innovative tools such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotic process automation.

Nonetheless, when deciding to move to the cloud, companies need a clear understanding of what their business wants to achieve so that they can plan an appropriate migration strategy, identify what systems and applications to upload, and what kind of cloud is the most convenient for them, and what benefits to expect for the company.

In most medium-sized or growing companies, technological environments are complex. They have rigid systems, making it challenging to innovate rapidly and profitably to respond to market changes and customer demands. Besides, the need to avoid interrupting the supply chain and increasing sustainability imperatives lead companies to more complex management processes when everything is on-premise. Thus, migration is no longer an option but a requirement for survival.

Deciding who and what to start the journey with

In this context, once the decision to start or accelerate the digital transformation has been taken, companies will need a technology partner to facilitate and speed up the journey to the cloud, regardless of how digitally mature they might be.

Another condition is to look for the most suitable solutions for their needs. An example of versatility for this transition towards a "smart company" is the end-to-end cloud computing solution offered by SAP through its SAP Business Technology Platform. This platform helps companies connect processes and experiences to make informed decisions on their data management, analytics, artificial intelligence, the Internet of things, blockchain technology, and application development and integration services on an open platform in the cloud.

Therefore, SAP launched a solution to support these processes and improve migration to the cloud (RISE with SAP) at the pace and in the way that best suit each company. To carry this out, SAP relies on internationally prestigious business partners with vast experience in technological implementations, such as SEIDOR, which is also a member of United VARs, an exclusive group of leading providers of global SAP implementations, all of which gives customers reassurance and support from those who know what they do and how they do it.

The best is yet to be

The future looks bright: Increasingly, companies are deciding the cloud is the best way to integrate their platforms, grow and develop.

Improving business integration is a top priority for the next two years. A few companies have some practice or experience in business integration, and the majority have already started moving towards that transformation by forming work teams within their organizations.

It may vary from one region to another. Still, most companies expect to deploy more than half of their workloads in a cloud-native environment in the next 12 to 18 months, and the common scenario will be to use two or more cloud service providers.

This is a massive challenge for companies. The success of their business will substantially depend upon their ability to adapt to the new cloud technologies.