Digital Transformation and Migrating to the Cloud

What is Digital Transformation?

Simply put, digital transformation is when processes, culture, business models or business outputs are digitized. Think big: Amazon online vs Sears paper catalog. Think daily: Email vs Xeroxed memos. Think engagement: Order and track Domino’s on your phone vs call and wait for pizza. Think COVID: Video conferences vs conference rooms.

The examples provided should get your imagination wondering- “What could we digitally transform in our business?” Pretend you are no longer allowed to use your office building. What could you digitize? These questions are more important than ever, with many businesses working in a remote or hybrid capacity due to the pandemic. This is where migrating to the cloud comes into play.

Cloud as a Concept

You’ve probably heard the term cloud computing, even if you don’t work in the IT industry. A multitude of businesses use cloud computing for accessing applications, file storage, collaboration and more.

Simply put, cloud computing is the delivery of computing services—including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics and intelligence—over the Internet (“the cloud”) to offer faster innovation, flexible resources and economies of scale. You typically pay only for cloud services you use, helping you lower your operating costs, run your infrastructure more efficiently and scale as your business needs change.

A fully optimized cloud solution will provide provisions for local access of designated data. You can access the cloud through multiple devices- even if you’re on the go. There are also work offline capabilities for offline scenarios. For most solutions, you can access local files from your machines. With a cloud-sync setup, copies of data are updated based on changes made over time.

Top Benefits of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a big shift from the traditional way businesses think about IT resources. So why migrate to the cloud? Microsoft offers seven common reasons organizations are turning to cloud computing services.

Cost
Cloud computing eliminates the capital expense of buying hardware and software and setting up and running on-site datacenters—the racks of servers, the round-the-clock electricity for power and cooling, and the IT experts for managing the infrastructure. It adds up fast.

Speed
Most cloud computing services are provided self service and on demand, so even vast amounts of computing resources can be provisioned in minutes, typically with just a few mouse clicks, giving businesses a lot of flexibility and taking the pressure off capacity planning.

Global scale
The benefits of cloud computing services include the ability to scale elastically. In cloud speak, that means delivering the right amount of IT resources—for example, more or less computing power, storage, bandwidth—right when they’re needed, and from the right geographic location.

Productivity
On-site datacenters typically require a lot of “racking and stacking”—hardware setup, software patching, and other time-consuming IT management chores. Cloud computing removes the need for many of these tasks, so IT teams can spend time on achieving more important business goals.

Performance
The biggest cloud computing services run on a worldwide network of secure datacenters, which are regularly upgraded to the latest generation of fast and efficient computing hardware. This offers several benefits over a single corporate datacenter, including reduced network latency for applications and greater economies of scale.

Reliability
Cloud computing makes data backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity easier and less expensive because data can be mirrored at multiple redundant sites on the cloud provider’s network.

Security
Many cloud providers offer a broad set of policies, technologies, and controls that strengthen your security posture overall, helping protect your data, apps, and infrastructure from potential threats.

The Importance of Data Loss Protection Solutions

Migrating to the cloud requires you to rethink data loss protection. It’s important to have a comprehensive data protection for your transforming network.

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) software detects potential data breaches and prevents them by monitoring, detecting and blocking sensitive data while in use, in motion and at rest.