SCOTT McGLINCHEY says moving your data to the cloud will give you a competitive advantage
Never has there been a more crucial time to harness the cloud. Whatever industry you are in, it has been a tough year with a lot of disruption, some of which, is likely to continue in the coming months. Both the pandemic and Brexit have caused much uncertainty and resulted in an economic landscape that would have been unimaginable back in January last year.
Lockdowns have contributed to an increase in demand for digital solutions and services for both consumers and businesses, driving organisations to fast track their digital transformation strategies in a bid to stay relevant, operational and sustainable.
Organisations such as Uber, Facebook and Spotify are well positioned to respond at pace when challenges like these arise, with the ability to launch new customer services and features quickly and at almost zero marginal cost.
They are natural innovators that can easily roll out new offerings and scale them up or down – at will. Significantly though, they do not have the burden of complex and large legacy estates which often need to be integrated with new software applications.
It cannot be denied that businesses such as these often set the new benchmark for customer experience, particularly among today’s tech-savvy consumers.
To deliver similar and superior customer experiences and at the same time reduce operating costs, we at Exception believe organisations now face an imperative to move their data to the Cloud – at pace.
Being constrained by your legacy platforms and enterprise architecture technologies that were not designed for today’s digital age – which require the building of an ever more complex layer of integration to support the delivery of such areas as omni-channel banking, or consumer self -service – isn’t the best solution anymore.
We view Data Integration as a Service (DIaaS) as the cloud service delivery solution for such data integration. DIaaS delivers an integration approach that provides connectivity to legacy/back-end systems, sources, files, and operational applications through the implementation of well-defined interfaces, web services, and calls between applications and data sources.
This provides a more loosely coupled environment, safe from complex interdependencies and enables integration across a multi-cloud environment and with third parties.
DIaaS enables organisations to:
- Deliver change faster
- Insulate legacy systems to reduce their change risk
- Cost effectively utilise modern mechanisms of integration
- Future-proof the integrations and reduce the total cost of ownership
Cloud-based integration services deliver the optimum integration when it is required, and only for a long as it is required. This ensures you do not consume costs when not needed. Not true of legacy architectures and systems which are inflexible and expensive to run.
Adopting this modern cloud-based approach to data will deliver greater agility, speed, and efficiency, at lower cost – helping to accelerate digital transformation and further innovation, which for most businesses is essential for growth, longevity, and future prosperity.
Scott McGlinchey is CEO of Exception, a digital services and solutions provider dedicated to helping organisations unlock value and create opportunity through the power of technology.
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