Cloud is much more than scalable infrastructure—it’s a catalyst for business innovation, reinvention and growth, says Accenture.
The extraordinary pace of change means businesses need to be nimbler and more agile than ever. Acting quickly in response to new opportunities and disruptions, unencumbered by legacy constraints, is essential. And innovation is a core part of that agility. But it’s also a trigger for a more fundamental reinvention, one where a business transforms what it does and how it does it to find new growth in a digital world.
Cloud is not simply a source of cheaper and better IT infrastructure. It’s also the primary enabler of business reinvention today. Why? Because it brings together everything you need to innovate—your data, your people, your partners, your processes, your technology—on one streamlined platform.
It allows you to analyze your data on a bigger scale and generate insights much faster. It lets your own teams create new products, services and experiences, while simultaneously benefiting from others’ creativity. It’s also the source of countless new hyperscaler and third-party services from some of the brightest minds on the planet.
Cloud = agility: Cloud’s flexibility enables business experimentation. It lets you spin up new environments instantly, try out several ideas at once, and see what’s working quickly and securely. It reduces or eliminates technical debt, freeing your organization from the shackles of your legacy estate. It means you can iterate faster, test out prototypes on demand and get real-time information to inform business decisions. And when the business needs to pivot quickly—such as in response to a global pandemic—it’s cloud that enables the necessary responsiveness, enabling you to push out new or updated products, services and experiences with unprecedented speed.
Cloud = business collaboration: Cloud facilitates coworking, cocreation and co-innovation both inside and outside the organization. It enables your own people to work together from different places and in more effective ways, as well as creating a closer connection with suppliers and partners. It means you can share data securely, apply AI models more effectively, streamline supply chains and create entirely new business models with your partners.
Cloud = transformation: The way a business creates value is about far more than its IT—it’s about people, process, partners and technology working in unison. However, the agility and flexibility of the cloud makes it the ideal platform for rethinking how the organization operates and what kind of value it creates for its customers. A cloud journey can expose and eliminate legacy inefficiencies, duplication, excessive customization and siloed ways of working—enabling the business to refocus on customer outcomes.
Put simply, cloud is how you get from where you are now to where you want to be tomorrow.
Capture cloud capabilities: Data and AI
Data is the fuel that powers nearly all business innovation today. And cloud is the perfect platform to quickly tap into your data and create new insights using advanced data science. Because advanced analytics and machine learning are available as a service in the cloud, virtually any business can now access these capabilities.
Cloud also lets you bring much more data together, including highly valuable unstructured or unlabeled data that was previously locked away or hard to use (such as unstructured notes from call center interactions). Then, when it comes to mining that data for insights, cloud’s ability to scale up and down means it’s much more efficient to run AI models that require intense bursts of compute power.
The secret to a data-driven reinvention in the cloud? Ensuring it’s one and the same with the business strategy. You should focus on the critical data elements and priority use cases that will deliver the greatest impact to the business and align with the overall goals of the organization.
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