Companies have proven to have the sufficient capacity to face extraordinary challenges and to be able to turn in a few days, with the support of their employees, clients and partners, all their activity to a totally digital and remote work model.
For many of them, the arrival of the pandemic and the lockdowns meant accelerating their digital transformation plans. Thus, our Digital Transformation Index report indicates that over the past year 75% of European organizations accelerated one or more digital transformation programs to react to change or to take better advantage of the opportunities that were presented. This reality demonstrates two key facts:
- First, that digital transformation is a continuous and iterative process.
- Second, that those who think digital first and are able to differentiate themselves through technology are better prepared than the rest to face the constant changes that the market experiences.
Learn and adapt quickly
All of the above, combined with increased IT investments, have created a new mindset based on the ability to ‘do any activity from anywhere«. It is a positioning that goes beyond the use of technological devices, but is based on a combination of technology and culture to create new processes and programs that accelerate connectivity, collaboration and therefore productivity.
To capitalize on this reality, business leaders are seeking new ways of working, bringing together diverse talents with unique skills, and embedding a new approach to testing and learning that enables them to make mistakes, learn, adapt, and move on with great speed and agility.
This is key to digital transformation, because real improvements come from both business process owners and technical teams, who together address problems and solutions. Thus, the digital infrastructure of a company becomes a platform for innovation, with cross-functional teams that collaborate and focus on the “why” of transformation, clear objectives, instead of the “how”.
Technology that delivers business results
By aligning decision making with business goals, rather than technology issues, CIOs can build a solid technology foundation and establish common tools and processes. Thus, it explores how innovations such as automation, 5G and the extraction of information in real time from data at the edge can maintain the relevance of the organization and boost its growth.
In the past, and from a technology perspective, these new opportunities typically resulted in complex, rigid and isolated projects, led by independent teams without horizontal collaboration. Each project presented different infrastructure needs, diverting CIOs’ attention from growth to operations.
Today, however, CIOs are increasingly looking for as-a-service solutions, which allow them to reduce the time and complexity of acquiring, managing, maintaining, and servicing physical IT infrastructures. With just a few clicks, it is now possible to explore a universe of services, answer a few questions, and subscribe to a new solution-as-a-service focusing on the necessary business goals.
The demand for this approach is growing. Analyst ESG’s 2021 Technology Spending Intentions report suggests that 53% of current Infrastructure as a Service users prefer a consumption-based model for data center infrastructures. Adopting a service-as-a-service approach offers companies several advantages such as:
- Flexibility to choose the technology services that work best for each company, paying only for what is needed when it is needed.
- A consistent experience across your infrastructure that grows or shrinks as capacity needs change. This applies to both expected and unexpected events, ranging from predictable busy periods to rapidly scaling to take advantage of a new market opportunity or, as we’ve already seen, the need to move a workforce to remote locations in a weekend. , like many companies had to do in March 2020.
With the flexibility to scale and manage infrastructure in this way, organizations can reduce risk and meet regulatory compliance by leveraging their own physical security, cybersecurity, and threat detection solutions to protect their intellectual property, customer and employee data.
Precisely, Dell Technologies APEX Proposition as a Service is focused on providing a strong results-focused foundation. APEX helps organizations simplify digital transformation processes by increasing IT simplicity, agility and control through a cloud-based service model. These benefits materialize in forecasts from analysts like IDC, who say that more than half of the data center infrastructure will be consumed as a service.
We are faced with a great opportunity to imagine what may be possible. By focusing on solid foundations and technology decisions focused on business results, companies can draw on the lessons of the most recent past and rely on all that digital transformation can offer, feeling prepared for everything that may come in the future.
Signed: Nieves González, Manager Solution Architects in Spain at Dell Technologies