While digital transformation is vital for success in the digital age, you shouldn’t consider it just another box to check. We’d all love to be able to order a “digital transformation” online and then deploy it instantly, but things just aren’t that easy in the real world.
True transformation is about adopting highly efficient digital processes, introducing revolutionary competencies in your workforce, and implementing new business models. As the word “transformation” implies, it requires a completely different approach from what you’ve done in the past. By deploying new strategies and gaining data-driven insights, you can advance agility, spark innovation, and redefine the customer experience as you know it.
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Digital transformation also means more than a hurriedly constructed technology roadmap. Before embarking on your digital transformation journey, you must identify where legacy systems are preventing you from implementing future-proof solutions. Only then can you set specific, attainable goals, supported by a business strategy that outlines critical leadership roles, bypasses traditional limitations, and helps you track and understand the ongoing phases of your transformation.
In this blog, we’ll take a closer look at three ideas you must consider to maximize your chances of digital transformation success.
1. Digital transformation requires a business-driven approach to cloud migration
Start your digital transformation efforts with an optimized cloud migration strategy based on solid business cases. This includes identifying new revenue opportunities and securing buy-in from leadership. More importantly, migrating to cloud is not just about changing technologies; it’s also about changing processes and how you provision your hybrid IT infrastructure.
When creating a digital transformation strategy, some enterprises plan their cloud migration as a technical project owned by the CIO’s office. Neglecting to properly consider the business drivers of cloud migration is one of the most common reasons digital transformation initiatives fail.
Make sure you ask questions from a business perspective: for instance, what key business outcomes are you looking to drive with your cloud migration? For some businesses, the answer will be modernization, faster launches, and global expansion; for others, greater agility and improved customer experience. If you don’t take time to fully understand the business outcomes you expect from your cloud migration, then you shouldn’t be surprised when you don’t achieve them. Asking yourself the hard questions in advance is essential to identifying the right cloud services for you.
Cloud migration involves both risk and reward. To mitigate the risks and maximize the rewards, follow these steps:
- Determine your existing cloud maturity level.
- Set the goals and milestones that matter most for your company.
- Develop a migration strategy with those goals in mind.
- Run your migration like an ongoing project, adjusting over time to keep up with changes in the business.
Your migration strategy should include a framework for planning, process prioritization and capturing any “low-hanging fruit” that provide immediate value. Use this framework as a baseline for designing and executing future migration activities.
2. Digital transformation requires partnerships to multiply business value
No organization has ever successfully pursued digital transformation alone. As industry ecosystems become more diverse and complex, the business value of tapping into those ecosystems is clear and ever-growing. It’s about teaming up with partners to find new skills and services, connecting with customers to better understand their expectations and priorities, and meeting those customer expectations with the right digital products and services in the right places.
If you want to thrive in a digital subscription economy, you need to move away from centralized data centers, in favor of distributed infrastructure positioned ever closer to edge locations. These locations are essential to any digital transformation project because they’re the places with the highest concentrations of potential partners and customers. To be successful with new technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), businesses need low-latency connectivity to the partners that enable those services and the customers that use them. Proximity plays an important role when adding edge infrastructure or scaling current deployments to different markets. How close do you want to get? It all depends on who you’re trying to connect with, and where you’re trying to connect with them.
Digital leaders seek out trusted partners who offer them the control, choice and reliability to unlock new business models and emphasize their competitive strengths with confidence.
3. Digital transformation requires interconnection
Interconnection is emerging as central to the digital economy. It enables private, dedicated connectivity between businesses and their partners or customers, helping them ensure reliability, low latency, and data security and privacy.
The Global Interconnection Index (GXI) is the industry’s leading source of data and insight on interconnection and its increasing impact on the digital world. It shows how digital leaders across all industries are accelerating their digital-first strategies. According to the report, global interconnection bandwidth will grow 44% CAGR by 2024, ultimately making it 15 times larger than the internet.
Interconnection bandwidth is growing quickly across the world because organizations are focused on becoming the disruptors of the digital age, rather than the disrupted. The only way to reliably do this is to replace traditional, centralized IT infrastructure with distributed, interconnected digital infrastructure that can support flexibility and agility in the face of rapid change.
By interconnecting with their partners and customers across their distributed digital footprint, businesses can become both suppliers and consumers. This helps them create a “network effect” that continuously compounds their value over time.
Digital transformation is about leveraging the right architecture and platform
For over 20 years, Equinix has been the world’s digital infrastructure company™. With Equinix IBX® data centers in more than 65 metros worldwide, Platform Equinix® can provide the infrastructure you need to get close to partners and customers at the edge, no matter where your digital transformation ends up taking you. In addition, our leading portfolio of interconnection services—including Equinix Fabric™, which offers secure, software-defined interconnection from anywhere across our global footprint—makes it easier to tap into the digital services that fuel your business transformation.
To explore the technology trends accelerating infrastructure change and learn how to build digital advantage, boost agility and deploy at software speed, read the digital leaders ebook today.
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Watch the video below to learn more about how the Equinix approach to digital infrastructure can help enable your digital transformation.
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