Cloud solutions at companies: step-by-step to success

"Ordered today – delivered today,” fast, around-the-clock customer and IT service, total transparency via social media – the business world is currently undergoing a radical, deep-rooted change and a fundamental digital transformation. Business requirements and processes at companies are changing rapidly as a result. Specialized departments, in particular, are demanding increasingly shorter and considerably more flexible provision times for applications as well as dynamic new cloud solutions in order to keep up with the developments going on outside the company. Businesses that are serious about building their customer base need to get serious about transforming their IT systems – and moving into the cloud.

Cloud solutions, embedded in the corporate and IT strategy and comprising part of the security concept, are quickly becoming the future of corporate IT.

Example, software-as-a-service: SaaS solutions are highly scalable, dynamic and fast and companies can use them in many areas including document management and sustainability management. This not only makes the transformation process to becoming a service-oriented company fast and secure, it also means that the times of specification sheets, lengthy demand requests and IT projects that take several years to complete are over (for good).

But it is important to make sure that a company’s current, heterogeneous IT landscape and its software – the backbone – do not get left by the wayside. The art is to get that it in shape for the cloud.

What can be done?

The only approach that makes sense here is a step-by-step approach, i.e., a multi-phase transformation process. The first step involves the CIO conducting a review of their current IT, i.e., enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and/or finance/controlling (FI/CO) systems, reducing complexity where possible and updating current applications.

Cloud solutions that are quickly accessible and easy to use are a must if a company decides to then further develop its current business model or introduce a new one. Specialized departments can use platforms like the Cloud Integration Center to access pre-configured, tested applications that comply with corporate policies and compliance guidelines. Users benefit from the short provision times they need and CIOs do not have to worry about specialized departments accessing cloud applications outside of corporate IT landscape. That is the transformation over to a successful enterprise cloud.