The cloud has become one of the biggest paradigm shifts in the computer age building new rules for businesses and how people work. It’s also transforming the way we communicate and share information, making it the core behind all the digital disruptions.

Realising the true potential of best cloud platforms that support business growth, organisations worldwide including industry leaders and emerging startups are taking their businesses to the next level. Every business in each industry globally has been influenced by the cloud, which is changing the service delivery methods and consumer behavior.

Today, businesses require faster access to market, agility, innovation and performance, and with the cloud, they can create compelling applications with better end-user experiences, workflows, security and analytical capab!!it!e.s to help increase revenues and reduce costs.

As modern businesses and innovative IT technologies originate in the cloud, industry analysts predict that 1 over 50% of all enterprise data will be managed in the cloud and 80% of application operations will be resolved autonomously, thanks to the significant improvements of cloud technologies. The growing portfolio of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications has enabled businesses to directly acquire solutions with little or no assistance from the IT department, eliminating the need for upfront capital and reducing the lag time from decision to value from months to days.

Pakistan’s cloud transformation journey gathers momentum

Pakistan, as a market, has witnessed tremendous growth in its cloud transformation drive over the last few years. From financial institutions to ICT providers, educational institutions to blue chip companies, local businesses have come on board for faster innovation and business transformation through cloud applications.

Oracle Cloud has played a key role in this journey, assisting top-notch Pakistani organizations to modernize their business processes and systems by simplifying and standardizing the performance of key business functions including human resources (HR), finance, and supply chain.

Pakistan’s emerging online marketplace Goto.com.pk successfully deployed Oracle Cloud to give a boost to its foothold in the online shopping industry, help improve business efficiencies, streamline inventory management and provide an enhanced shopping experience to its customers.

Sardar Bahadur Khan Women’s University (SBKWU), a leading research and teaching institution in Balochistan, has started to transform its core financial processes with the deployment of Orac!e C!cud, which can help provide employees with real-time access to critical information and help improve the efficiency and consistency of its planning and budgeting processes.

Multinet Pakistan, one of the country’s premier information and communication solutions provider, has selected Oracle Cloud Applications to help modernize its financial operations and to help completely automate the key processes in order to free up its staff from routine transactions and focus more on innovative data analysis to support more informed decision-making.

The beauty of Pakistan’s cloud journey is that it has helped organizations realize the importance of moving into an OPEX (operational expenditure) model from a CAPEX (capital expenditure) model. Many businesses have understood that it is not just about spending money on technology but a prime opportunity to rationalize their finance operations, which, in the long run, can have a much bigger impact on their bottom line than cutting IT costs.

Deployment of modern cloud applications has also helped Chief Information Officers (CIO) become more strategic. Implementing cloud-based applications provide companies with the opportunity to take a step back and reevaluate all of the existing controls, roles, and segregation of duties; meaning that C now have a lot of space for innovation and strategic business thinking.

Getting cloud ready

Organizations are increasingly adopting cloud-based management solutions. According to the recent 2IDC Vendor Spotlight survey, 50% of the users planning net-new IT operations analytics (ITOA) solutions want to move from on-premises to cloud service-delivered solutions. Public cloud-delivered system management revenue grew 46% in 2016. Strong growth of public cloud-based solutions is forecasted to continue through 2020 with revenue expected to grow to more than double 2016 levels.

For Pakistani businesses, the reality is that technology-driven disruption is happening at a breakneck speed and businesses must sprint to keep up with fast-changing variables. Competitive pressures, the impact of disruptive technologies, and constantly increasing user expectations make the speed of delivery and quality of service top priorities.

A new breed of comprehensive and automated system management solutions is needed to ensure these qualities in complex, high-scale, hybrid IT environments. While some Pakistani companies are ready to move completely to the cloud, most desire a systematic approach — moving applications, one-by-one, to the public cloud, while retaining some mission-critical workloads on-premises.

This is particularly true for larger enterprises in banking, insurance, telecommunications and government domains, which are more restrained by tighter rules and regulations around data privacy and governance. The question is just how best to travel this journey, especially when, in most cases, enterprise customers want the best of both worlds — maximum ROI from legacy investments and the advantages of a modern, scalable, and secure cloud infrastructure.

Indeed, a blend of on-premises and different models of cloud applications will be a key part of almost every company’s cloud journey for some time to come. As such, in the first instance, Pakistani if leaders today should concentrate on optimizing their existing infrastructure and becoming cloud-ready, by simplifying, standardizing and modernizing existing on-premises infrastructure. Most importantly, business leaders have to understand how cloud applications will help their companies move forward into a state of readiness for their path to cloud innovation.

Final thoughts

In Pakistan, the shift to cloud is making most enterprises reevaluate their application landscape and architecture. Pakistan has the potential to become a cloud-ready nation since there is a growing trend of migrating to cloud over the last few years.

Dissatisfaction with current IT management approaches, which are often fragmented, involves substantial human interference and silo-based, is a prominent reason for many companies in Pakistan to consider adopting cloud-based management solutions. In that sense, a comprehensive cloud suite like the Oracle Cloud will enable customers to extend, enrich, and customize their application environments with unprecedented intelligence, security, speed, and predictability. 3New cloud offerings like ‘Soar to the Cloud’—the world’s first automated enterprise cloud application upgrade product—will enable customers to reduce the time and cost of cloud migration by up to 30 percent.

Local organizations should closely evaluate the state of ‘cloud readiness’ before adopting cloud applications into their business processes. Rapid innovation is the key, as change is the only constant. Cloud-based AT, chatbots, and machine learning technologies will be the trending analytical technologies to process big data. The pace of local businesses will be changed significantly by a new generation of business applications built on the blockchain.

To keep pace, Pakistani companies must keep abreast of innovation and create opportunities to drive change by leveraging cloud and adopting emerging technologies.