Several factors, including the need for increased agility, scalability, and cost savings have driven the transition to cloud infrastructure in Australia. Australian businesses are increasingly embracing cloud technology, enabling them to quickly and easily access new capabilities, scale their resources, and reduce their total cost of ownership. Additionally, cloud infrastructure is often more secure and compliant than traditional on-premise solutions, offering managed services, which can help businesses to take advantage of the latest cloud technologies without the need for additional IT staff.
Migrating your IT landscape to the cloud delivers various benefits, including flexibility, cost savings, and faster innovation. With more sustainable, cheaper, and quicker delivery of IT services, cloud technology continues to spread out to the hyper-scalers.
In 2013, the Australian government set out guidelines for government agencies to adopt a cloud-first strategy. This led to a rise in cloud spending from $4.7 million and is expected to reach $20.8 billion by 2025.
While cloud migration has been promising financially, accelerating the rise of cloud technology, a few challenges may inhibit its growth. One of the limitations highlighted the lack of technical skills to take advantage of the potential of cloud infrastructure.
Creating a Cloud Plan: Strategies for Cloud Adoption
The shift from traditional operations to the cloud is an opportunity for organisations to develop and implement a future-forward plan. The first step in the cloud transformation journey is assessing and strategising resources, capacity, security, and compliance needs.
There are various factors that shape an organisation’s cloud strategy. Many of these include but are not limited to – the broader context of the marketplace, competitor analysis, and evaluation of each element of organisational value. Such decisions and strategies can significantly impact the trajectory of any organisation.
Initially, business owners tend to focus on revenue-defining questions around the potential of cloud migration linked to greater efficiencies and savings, along with long-term control, flexibility, and scalability. When cloud migration isn’t an area of focus, a cloud provider can explain any organisation may respond to such factors, which otherwise can be difficult to determine. With a deep understanding of technology trends and emerging tools, AUCloud can help you implement industry-specific leading practices to benefit from the full potential of cloud technology.
Training the Workforce: Developing Technical Expertise
Cloud strategy can fundamentally impact business strategies and operational models. Cloud migration is essentially a disguised business transformation.
While cloud technology offers limitless benefits to various organisations across Australia, some are still deprived of the optimal value of the cloud due to limited education. Employees require the necessary technical skills to operate and leverage different data architectures and workflows on the cloud.
Cloud technology will transform businesses in Australia by offering flexible and cost-effective computing solutions. Australian organisations will be able to use multiple high-performance computing resources from one location, which means they can access essential services anywhere in the world—all without having to worry about physical servers and maintenance costs.
As organisations transition from traditional workplaces, they must evaluate the required skill sets and competencies to explore the benefits cloud technology offers. In addition, provision for the cloud environment must be specific to the leading practices of the organisation to deliver optimal results. At this stage, business leaders consider current organisational demands such as cost management, identity management, and security, along with backup & recovery plans to ensure resilience.
The Development of Data Ownership and Control
As more Australian organisations shift to the cloud, there’s an increasing need for data sovereignty, ensuring that sensitive data stays on national soil. The recent cyber attacks in Australia have also prompted the conversation of data security and sovereignty. While public sector agencies lay the crucial groundwork with data localisation policies, the data storage patterns of Australian organisations are more local than ever before.
Data sovereignty has become a market driver for data storage trends in 2023 and beyond. The past few years have shown the increasing frequency and sophistication of opportunistic cyberattacks on Australian organisations. In response, the Australian government has developed a cyber security strategy to strengthen the country’s critical infrastructure while preventing cyberattacks.
The Minister for Home Affairs and Minister for Cyber Security, Clare O’Neil, confirmed her goals to make Australia the world’s most cyber-secure country by 2023.
The Rise of Artificial Intelligence
Cloud technology is, undoubtedly, the foundational platform to enable new-wave technologies. Artificial Intelligence is now stretching the boundaries of computing capabilities, enabling digital solutions where AI can make decisions without any direct human intervention. Australian organisations also continue to emphasise the importance of AI adoption as a game changer for modern strategies.
While AI infrastructure may offer endless opportunities, many organisations still face challenges, despite the growing demand. Such technologies require digital ecosystems that can host the frameworks to sustain next-generation connectivity.
Since gathering data and training algorithms will require huge amounts of computing power and data storage, it is generally more cost-efficient to opt for as-a-service models. Cloud service providers are also increasingly dependent on AI for various tasks, from managing vast distributed networks to providing scalable resources to their clients while regulating the power and cooling systems in data centres.
Implementation of Multi-Cloud Strategies
While 2023 enabled businesses to harness hybrid cloud opportunities, 2023 will allow businesses to leverage diversified services across various cloud providers with a multi-cloud approach.
Adopting such strategies allows quicker and easier migration of sensitive data and applications across various platforms, preventing organisations from being tied to a specific digital ecosystem.
With predictions of 84% of mid-to-large companies adopting a multi-cloud approach in 2023, it has become one of the year’s defining trends for cloud technology.
The Switch to Remote Workplaces
The transition to the cloud offers huge opportunities while ensuring data security. In addition, efficient data storage and disaster recovery solutions allow organisations to ensure business continuity after any natural disaster.
While COVID-19 initiated the global lockdown and economic shutdown, leading to remote workplaces, it has become a crucial trend in the digital landscape for various global organisations. To prepare organisations and employees, business leaders need to optimise processes and infrastructure to protect against increasing cyber threats, ensuring effective communications and maximised productivity.
To minimise performance issues and ensure employee productivity, organisations must deploy accessible and unified communications platforms. As a result, it offers increased adaptability to evolving conditions with cost-effective digital solutions. With cloud technology, organisations can achieve these goals and prepare for a digital future.
Start Your Cloud Transformation Journey With AUCloud Today
Cloud computing is a viable and secure alternative to individually managed hardware and software—transforming efficiency, productivity, reliability, and service delivery. By harnessing the power of cloud infrastructure, organisations can benefit from both vertical scalability and enhanced flexibility to move resources rapidly and seamlessly within web-based systems.
And by eliminating the traditional on-premise solutions (hardware, software, operating systems and applications), organisations enjoy an array of benefits that include better cost management, disaster recovery setups and more.
With Australia’s increasing focus on data sovereignty, transitioning to a sovereign cloud environment is a key strategy to ensure all your sensitive data remains in Australia under Australian jurisdictional control – always. It mitigates third-party vulnerabilities and is designed to meet specific security frameworks and compliance standards, delivering sovereign data protection.
As the first VMware Sovereign Cloud Provider in Australia, with hardly a few recognised VMware Providers in this space, AUCloud offers sovereign cloud-based solutions, so organisations can leverage limitless scalability, flexible storage, minimised downtime, high-speed data transfers, and sovereign data protection.
With VMware tools, organisations can ensure a seamless, quick, and secure migration of their organisational workloads directly to the cloud.
Talk to an AUCloud representative today to explore the range of services and capabilities cloud technology has to offer as you complete your transition. Contact us at 1800 282 568 or email us at [email protected].
