Scale with hybrid cloud 

The demand for cloud is soaring—driven by companies’ need to adapt to a recovering economy with agility; optimize IT resources and cost; and support remote operations. Just take a look at these numbers from our TCS 2021 Global Financial Leadership Study: The Next Era in FP&A1: 

• 69% of 750 global senior finance leaders surveyed said they plan to increase investments in cloud-based systems over the next 12 months.
• 63% said they have increased investments in cloud-based systems over the past year.

Clearly, companies realize that cloud is an enabler for business today. It’s an integral component for enterprise resilience, supporting high availability, disaster recovery and cost optimization. However, as they rush to embrace cloud, companies need to realize that a robust cloud strategy is key to driving full value from the technology. An efficient and resilient hybrid cloud strategy backed by seamless execution can accelerate enterprise growth and transformation. For instance, innovative business models and resilient business strategies built on hybrid cloud are helping enterprises achieve better security and regulatory compliance, higher return on investment (RoI), IT infrastructure and application modernization, and more. So, how do you create a robust hybrid cloud strategy to scale and build resilience? 

The first step forward: hybrid cloud platform

Building a hybrid cloud platform strategy is typically the first step to moving forward in your cloud journey. A unified technology platform, as shown in the following graphic, enables the integration and orchestration of operations across multiple clouds. This platform-driven model for cloud management and orchestration gives organizations the ability to embrace multi-cloud to better respond to change in a post-pandemic world. It’s key to driving IT synergies, as it fosters a confluence of people, data, devices, processes, and systems to catalyze an ecosystem that is collaborative and efficient.  

Once you have built your digital core with a hybrid cloud platform, here are a few things to focus on to accelerate your evolution to a more digital business with the capability to embrace disruption: 

Take a 360-degree approach to resilience

Legacy technology is holding back enterprises with high ownership costs, unscalable architecture, low automation potential, and lack of flexibility of these systems. Traditionally, the way to build resilience has been to focus primarily on IT infrastructure and security. Today, modernizing IT infrastructure on cloud provides a 360-degree approach to resilience that covers IT infrastructure (think scalability/flexibility), business operations (high availability and disaster recovery solutions), governance (platform-based orchestration and reporting), and data privacy and security. 

Enrich your innovation ecosystem 

How well you embrace innovation is what sets you apart from the competition and gives you a competitive edge for accelerating growth and transformation. This is where cloud comes in. A robust cloud strategy allows a convergence of technologies on a single platform, enabling next-gen capabilities like DevSecOps (development, security, and operations) that fast-tracks innovation. 

This becomes particularly relevant when enterprises continue to expand, and their IT landscape gets complex. Think mergers and acquisitions (M&As) or divestitures of new business subsidiaries. IT integration or separation would have taken years with the conventional IT setup. But today, enterprises can leverage a hybrid cloud ecosystem to synergize IT or reduce the separation cycle time by enabling a logical separation. All this without setting up an entire infrastructure from scratch, thus streamlining and supporting strategic business decisions. 

Fuel enterprise synergy and collaboration

With remote working and remote operations becoming an integral part of emerging business models, you could be concerned about security, data privacy, and employee productivity. Investing in unified communications solutions and security tools that allow employees to work remotely without compromising security is an imperative. Transform the way you run your day-to-day operations. Start by moving from a desktop-centric model to a multi-device, anytime-anywhere model that fosters agility and provides employees the flexibility to work from anywhere while boosting productivity and security.

Building new beginnings 

Resilience enabled by a hybrid cloud platform and a trusted partner can empower enterprises to effectively respond during times of uncertainty while accelerating their digital journey. With a cloud-led ecosystem, you are well on your way to build a resilient and sustainable business future.