The cloud has grown from a concept since 1963 into an on-demand service put into use by Amazon for its web-based retail services in the early 2000’s, followed by quickly being commoditized. Why is it then that a lot of enterprises are just now looking into the cloud to help them manage their compute? While it seems many organizations took advantage of the many benefits offer, just as many are now pivoting environment and realizing that the cloud offers flexibility while still being able to leverage control, collaboration while still applying process and good practices, and most importantly, the ability to adapt to market demands quickly in this ever changing environment.

Almost overnight we witnessed the move of the workforce from an office to their homes for safety and social distancing reasons. The old way of doing business was put to the test and quickly found wanting. Technologies that we hadn’t used, or for many hadn’t even heard of, became overnight necessities in this new business environment, like Zoom for conferencing and Client Management tools for managing remote laptops and desktops. Old technologies were quickly seen as a dividing line between a company being labelled as essential or non-essential.

Many in-person activities were able to be moved to a virtual scenario, for instance many law firms now advertise that new clients can conduct everything from initial interviews to final settlement of their injury cases on-line. A majority of these firms are leveraging SaaS solutions to handle a previously manual driven workload that required someone to take the initial statements and information in-person. Now that these businesses have digitized, they are realizing not only time-savings but being able to align their human resources to more important and vital work.

The question now isn’t “should we migrate to the cloud?”, but more appropriately “what could we migrate to the cloud?” The tangible advantages of migrating to the cloud are readily apparent:

• Increased collaboration, especially amongst dispersed work groups and colleagues
• Flexibility to meet growth demands
• No need to administrate the product (Disaster Recovery, Updates, etc.)
• Ability to meet regional and country security and privacy requirements

In this new normal, there are some additional considerations:

• Ability to deploy a hybrid approach by segregating data hosted on-premise and in the cloud
• Re-architecting application strategies to meet the needs of applications built for the cloud, others that perform better on-premise
• Adaptability to accommodate devices and plan for the Internet of Things (IoT)
• Ability to offer services and flexibility for employees, no matter the location
• Streamlining work processes and routines to leverage AI and human resources better

We’ve seen a rapid evolution in the way we work through this digital revolution with the accelerator all the way down, only those organizations that can adapt to the needs of their customers, employees, and the ever changing “new normal” will be able to stay relevant and productive.

Only a few early adapters could truly envision what the cloud would be today. The rapid pace of growth and change will easily see such revolutions happening in a much smaller time frame. Cloud not only offers the ability for organizations to remain adaptable in current environments, but to be flexible to the requirements that will cause them to pivot as change inevitably happens. Is the cloud the answer to all of your questions? While it may not solve all of your business challenges, it should remain an important consideration during this time of rapid digital transformation.

Humans have observed electricity since we watched lightning in the sky or touched an electric eel. We tried to understand this power for millennia but only relatively recently began to harness it with lights, then motors and beyond. Now electricity is the backbone of our modern society, powering our lives in ways seen and unseen every second of the day.

From the early days of using electric power for lightbulbs to today, where it powers tiny motors to giant engines, the effects of electricity can be seen and felt everywhere. But there is another force that is even more elusive, yet just as powerful as electricity. It helps us decide when and how much electricity is used, how to accommodate for increased demand, and how to plan for changes. This force helps us better manage not just electricity but so many other things around us – and it is increasing each day.

I’m talking about data. We have collected data since the early days of our species, when scribes wrote down how much grain was gathered and stored. Data drove decisions on how to plant, where to plant, who owed what, and countless other information. Like our ancestors, we know that the sharing and collaboration of data facilitates in-depth understanding, more powerful decision making, more understanding, and just about everything else.

These days, the problem with data is not that we don’t have it, but that we have too much of it. Studies have shown that 90 – 95% of data goes unused and un-analyzed. And with each person on the planet generating over 1MB of new data every second, there is an avalanche of data to go through and try to understand. The question, then, is how do we harness this power and leverage it to help our enterprise not only manage data, but grow with it.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the only way. With AI, you can detect trends, analyze patterns, make correlations that may have gone unnoticed, back up decisions with data… the sky is the limit. Gone are the days when you had a bunch of guys in green visors and puffy sleeves looking at ledgers to parse good information; in fact, putting one person in charge of looking through data to find an answer would be like giving them a pair of tweezers to find a specific grain of sand on the beach (which I have seen happen on the corporate side of a few businesses I have interacted with.)

AI can help you leverage the gigabytes of information you already have and will continue to gather to drive the decisions that will benefit your enterprise. Much research has gone into the benefits of data analysis, or “Big Data”, and depending on the report, companies could experience anywhere from 30–60% growth if they could only harness and leverage the data that they currently have.

So, the question becomes not whether to use AI, but how to use it most effectively. This involves asking questions like:

• Are the enterprise products we use to support our business not only creating and collecting data, but using AI to see trends, patterns, and other important information so we can grow?
• What is our AI strategy?
• Which AI platform should we use, and can we use multiple platforms?
• Does 1+1=2 in our AI strategy, or does it equal -1 because the two platforms don’t communicate together, causing more work and less visibility?
• Alternately, does it equal 5 or more because of the power and understanding we can extract from it?
• How about your business-critical applications in finance, HR, ITSM, ITOM, sales, procurement, etc. – do they leverage AI to help you make decisions? Why not?
• What are you missing by not looking at AI?

Like early humans watching lighting in the sky, we know that data is there and we know how powerful it can be. We simply need the right tools to harness that power. For the modern age, that means we need AI. I believe we will be amazed by the illumination that it brings.