According to IBM Institute for Business Value C-Suite Series: The 2021 CEO Study, with insights from more than 3,000 CEOs around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic served as a turning point for how businesses respond to uncertainties.
As CEO Fernando Gonzalez of CEMEX mentioned in the study, ”COVID-19 has changed how we look at the future. We started questioning and challenging everything. The traditional ways of planning are outdated. We sense every hour, every day, every week, and react to it.”
The urgent question facing CEOs today is this: “What will it take to be essential?”
Most CEOs emphasize that they have to focus on their edge as a business, what makes them different, and how they would deliver the most value to their customers, employees, community, and investors.
In this article, we defined a cloud-first strategy as an approach by which organizations consider moving infrastructures and operations to cloud-computing platforms first rather than any other alternatives. As your organization decides to think ahead and transition from on-premise landscapes to the cloud, knowing what to expect and how to ensure efficiency in planning and implementation provides higher chances for cloud migration success.
One of the risk considerations in cloud migration is data security. As organizations are unique and demand different requirements, data security and governance need to be embedded throughout the organization's cloud-first strategy.
For example, SAP is a mission-critical application that helps organizations respond more effectively to customer needs. After migrating SAP to the cloud, it begins processing large volumes of data daily from diverse sources. This makes it essential to manage data—particularly master data—to prevent errors, avoid unnecessary costs, and ensure compliance with legal requirements. Effective data management is key to the success of any cloud migration project.
In the same study conducted by IBM, the 3000 CEOs noted that “technological factors are the number one most important external force that will impact their enterprises over the next 2-3 years.” These factors that help businesses deliver results are the Internet of Things, Cloud Computing, and Artificial Intelligence. As CEO Ross McEwan of the National Australia Bank mentioned, organizations with good technology platforms generally performed well during the pandemic. However, those that are technologically underdeveloped struggled to keep up. As such, CEOs around the world started examining the following questions when planning a move to the cloud:
What is our essential strategy?
What is our essential technology?
Who is our essential workforce?
Who are our essential leaders?
What are our essential risks?
In response to these questions, CEOs emphasized that building an organization capable of adapting to a rapidly changing business landscape requires a focus on several key priorities: enhancing operational agility and flexibility, securing data and systems, improving data transparency, increasing accountability, fostering flexible partner ecosystems, and minimizing siloed handoffs across teams.
These strategic goals are enabled and accelerated by the following drivers of cloud adoption:
Building and maintaining on-premises data centers can be extremely costly. Organizations must invest in physical hardware—including computing, storage, and networking resources—and budget for ongoing maintenance and periodic replacements to maintain optimal performance. In contrast, cloud solutions offer a pay-as-you-go model, allowing businesses of all sizes to minimize upfront costs. Instead of investing heavily in infrastructure, organizations only pay for the resources they use. As business needs evolve, cloud services also make it easy to scale resources up or down accordingly.
When it comes to growing your business, scalability has always been a key strategic focus for organizations. Whether in financial planning or IT infrastructure, the ability to scale ensures greater agility and responsiveness to change. While scalability is often viewed as increasing resources to drive more revenue, it doesn’t always mean adding more to achieve growth.
With all the digital transformation efforts that we have seen in the last few years, several organizations are aggressively automating their business processes. Automation reduces the time required to process individual transactions, meaning fewer resources are needed—without sacrificing revenue. In fact, by accelerating transaction processing, automation can increase throughput and drive higher revenue.
Cloud solutions support this model perfectly by offering on-demand scalability. They allow organizations to scale infrastructure up or down based on real-time workload demands, ensuring that you're only using—and paying for—what you need at any given time.
Another key driver of cloud transformation is the ability to access cloud-based data and applications from virtually anywhere with an internet connection. Employees no longer need to be tied to a physical office to access the files and tools they need to stay productive. By moving data and applications to the cloud, organizations gain the flexibility to support remote and hybrid work environments.
In addition, cloud providers offer a wide range of pre-built tools and services tailored to different business needs. Whether you're looking for enhanced storage, computing power, or automation capabilities, chances are you'll find multiple solutions to choose from.
If you're seeking a platform that can seamlessly orchestrate your SAP systems with agentless monitoring in the cloud, IT-Conductor delivers just that—and more. Our platform enables workflow automation tailored to your business requirements, helping you streamline operations and accelerate your digital transformation journey.
One of the most significant advantages of the cloud is the ability to deploy new applications in a matter of hours, compared to the weeks or even months it can take with traditional infrastructure. This agility benefits not only the teams managing the migration but the entire organization.
Technical teams understand that migration projects require close coordination across multiple departments to manage the migration of applications, data, and related systems. With cloud solutions, much of the heavy lifting—especially around provisioning physical hardware—is eliminated. This drastically reduces the time, effort, and complexity involved, allowing teams to focus on higher-value tasks and accelerate project timelines.
With IT-Conductor’s powerful orchestration and automation capabilities for SAP landscapes, you gain more than just time and effort savings during migration projects—you unlock long-term efficiency and scalability. IT-Conductor can integrate with tools like Git, Ansible, and Terraform, enabling you to automate nearly every aspect of your IT operations. From provisioning infrastructure to managing complex workflows, discover how our platform empowers you to streamline processes and innovate faster.
Migrating to the cloud gives businesses a competitive edge by enabling faster delivery of innovative, easily accessible technologies to customers, clients, and communities. With reduced infrastructure costs and maintenance overhead, organizations can shift their focus toward delivering greater value. This not only accelerates time-to-market for applications but also boosts agility and enhances customer satisfaction, ultimately driving stronger returns for investors.
Last but not least, business continuity is a critical factor organizations consider when deciding whether to migrate to the cloud. Leading cloud providers like Amazon and Microsoft operate data centers globally, offering built-in high availability and resilience. This ensures that even in the face of unexpected events, such as natural disasters or global crises, your systems remain accessible and operational.
By hosting your data and applications in the cloud, your organization benefits from redundancy and failover mechanisms that traditional on-premises setups may lack. For example, if a catastrophic event impacts your headquarters, your operations can continue uninterrupted because your data and systems are already safeguarded in the cloud.
As CEOs around the world ask, “What will it take to be essential?”, the key drivers for cloud transformation allow them to reexamine their current business strategies and ensure market viability and competitiveness.
As CEMEX CEO Fernando Gonzalez said during an interview in the IBM 2021 CEO Study, “Part of the investment is not going to pay off. But it doesn’t matter. You try to understand what is not working properly, you stop doing that, and you focus on what you think can really pay off.”
This mindset captures the essence of transformation: continuously learning, adapting, and investing in what delivers the most value.