Paul Marsh, Senior Director, Europe Cloud Transformation Lead for Avanade collaborated with Bart Van Wonterghem, Partner Technology Manager for Microsoft BeLux on the contents of this blog.

The growing insight of IT and business experts is clear: the time for cloud is now. 
A highly competitive and disruptive business environment is forcing companies to operate with more agility. New business models emerge rapidly and fast moving new players are showing up and capturing market share. Overall, companies face fierce competition regardless of the sector in which they operate. It is remarkable that industry stalwarts must prove they can operate efficiently, with agility and demonstrate innovation or risk being passed by these new entrants and their flexible business models. IT Modernization, underpinned by cloud, makes all this possible and for those that embrace it, there are real business results to be realized.

Let IT focus on the core business
Any organization, in any industry, gains an advantage from moving to the cloud as it enables IT to focus on the core business. Companies save time and money as they start consuming instead of creating the commodity infrastructure and platforms that do not differentiate them as a business.  This enables them to focus their time, energy and budget on activities that generate business value such as improved customer experiences and insightful analytics. As applications can be built faster and more efficiently, time-to-market and the development cost of new solutions will decrease significantly.

But even more importantly, companies benefit from the elasticity and scale of the cloud, as well as from its global reach. The richness of the platform enables clients to build and run cloud-optimized applications in a cheaper and much more flexible way, but this has to be combined with modern application development processes and an operating model that can bring more agile and efficient ways of working.

Measuring ROI
When it comes to cloud transformation, ROI is where the proverbial rubber hits the road. No cloud strategy will be deemed successful if you can’t identify a positive ROI and this is where many companies fall short of their goals. For some companies, the cloud is something they are dipping their toe in rather than taking the plunge and while this is understandable from a risk standpoint, it typically does not produce much of an ROI. Shifting a few applications to the cloud may actually result in cost increases as you invest in both a cloud infrastructure while continuing to maintain your own infrastructure. While the cloud is not an all or nothing proposition, the real business benefits will happen when you make a significant commitment to the cloud. 

Even for companies that take the plunge and move a large portion of their apps to the cloud, they may still struggle with ROI. This is because they are focused on infrastructure savings rather than how the cloud has enabled their business. We encourage companies to take a broader look and understand how their cloud strategy is impacting the business. Has it reduced time to market for new applications or made it possible to grant broader access to key information and resources? The cloud is about more than new infrastructure, it’s about how that new infrastructure facilitates positive change in your environment.

Don’t go it alone, guided by experts
The reason many companies are still not kicking off their digital transformation journey is a lack of understanding of the ‘public cloud’ as a whole. Combine that with a lack of expertise and not knowing “how” to start and you get lots of companies sitting on the sidelines thinking about cloud but not acting. 

Companies need to have an understanding of the journey they will go through and a belief that they can avoid common pitfalls. In an ideal transformation, companies are guided by experts in each step of the process. Not only should the experts take care of the actual cloud migration, but they should also bring expertise in the required technologies so that bumps in the road can be minimized. 

Given the changing IT landscape, the time is more than right to embrace cloud!

If you would like to learn more about Avanade’s approach to cloud transformation, register for our webinar: Accelerate your cloud journey and realize business value. In this webinar we will share industry trends, the 6 elements of cloud success and how to identify the low hanging fruit in your cloud migration strategy.