Cloud adoption is now a key framework for the technology that upholds our everyday life, and has evolved into an essential feature for all businesses.

Within the first phase of the Covid-19 pandemic, we saw a clear focus on crisis management – with organisations desperate to build on their cloud usage and adopt new tech to ensure business continuity. Now, cloud technology is vital to a company’s digital transformation. With the situation in our world continuing for the foreseeable future, businesses are being pushed to guarantee their digital transformation to not only be dependable but competitive.

As a huge part of society responded to the pandemic and made the decision to enter into some sort of lockdown, companies and businesses of every kind were affected. We witnessed a mass employment shift from being centralised in offices to working remotely from home, and the cloud sphere became depended upon in ways we have never seen before. Not only did businesses have to ensure access to files to be able to continue to work from a new work environment, they also had to ensure their cloud-based services were entirely stable and secure. Since then, the world has moved on to the next phase, which involves a focus on leveraging the right tech, increasing business advocacy and gathering insights to move towards a more all-pervasive model of business.

Whether you’re 90% through completion or just getting started on your digital transformation journey, businesses must approach their change in three key areas.

The first should be at the heart of all businesses’ efforts; transforming the customer experience. People, and more specifically customers, are the reason you exist and continue to flourish. Their comfort, happiness and ability to access a great end product – whether it’s migrating small workloads to cloud or a complete rehaul towards enterprise-wide virtual desktop infrastructure. People need to be central to your business model and first on your list when considering a digital transformation.

A successful example of this was our work with a large telecommunications network provider in the USA. The company wanted to store and access their documents and digital assets in a structured manner, with access from anywhere in order to drive omni-channel content management and accelerate experience delivery. To help them achieve these objectives, we proposed a Digital Contract Automation & Storage (DCAS) solution – a cloud-based integrated solution for e-signature and digital storage that provides enhanced associate and agent experience at various corporate and retail stores. These solutions provided secure storage, collaboration, upload and management of all documents digitally – which lead to a much-enhanced customer experience.

The second area to focus on is systems and processes. Nearly all business models need updating to adapt with an everchanging world. This is particularly true in 2020 and will be for the years to come, as we can be sure that this pandemic will change the workings of the world forever. We can see just how important this step is, with the example of a US-based steel distribution company. They had legacy systems that resulted in a significant amount of manual operations and lack of end-to-end visibility of data – which hindered their growth and speed-to-market. Wipro helped the organization remove bottlenecks in key business processes and recommended a robust solution for current and future needs. This led to an updated and streamlined processes, which improved financial analytics and profitability analysis.

Finally, digital transformations don’t exist without technology. The introduction of new devices, machines, servers and cloud services, as well as updating the old, existing units and model, is essential to keep business fresh and competitive. This has been shown with our work with a global packaged food company which creates plant-based products through over 100 different brands. This UK-based food company embarked on an all-new IT infrastructure and applications landscape in place of the legacy inherited from the parent company. Wipro worked with the client to implement the entire infrastructure (excluding network), supply chain applications and processes. This focus on upgrading and refreshing the system allowed the company to have access to a future-proof platform with world-class processes and technology to support the business.

Within that entire overview of how to focus your digital transformation efforts, cloud adoption is undoubtably a crucial, underlying part that will transform business for the better – or worse if not executed, implemented or upheld correctly. Either way it is now more important than ever to any businesses’ future.

Want to listen to senior executives and thought leaders around enabling digital transformation for your business? Register for Digital Transformation Week, April 20-22.