Cloud computing is fast becoming a C-suite discussion topic as its role as an enabler for digital transformation gets firmly established. Its rapid growth strongly endorses the inevitability of cloud computing. Pegged at almost USD 200
billion in 2019, it is forecast to grow 3.5 times to USD 685 billion by 2027, a CAGR of 17.6%.1 It’s safe to assume that cloud technologies find a place in almost every enterprise today. Several factors, both at a macroeconomic and a business level, are behind this phenomenal growth.
On the macroeconomic front, advances in technology such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), internet of things (IoT) and blockchain have given birth to the digital consumer and aided a meteoric rise in social media usage and expanded its influence. Businesses are expected to cater to diverse requirements and deliver personalized experiences to customers. Plus, the extraordinary circumstances triggered by the pandemic and ensuing stay-at-home advisories worldwide, which created over 1 billion remote workers almost overnight2 , further added to the challenges.
Businesses must be resilient, responsive to market dictates, and ready to switch to new working models seamlessly and
swiftly to thrive in such uncertain and demanding conditions. For this to happen effectively, they must collaborate beyond their organization’s boundaries and build an ecosystem of business partners. They must rely on data to drive decision making and establish intelligent and automated operations to navigate the complex business environment. At the same time, in such dynamic environments, enterprises would prefer to reduce capital investments.
Cloud technologies can single handedly help an enterprise address these critical requirements making a cloud-first strategy imperative for them to survive and succeed. Cloud’s footprint sprawls across the enterprise and covers business and IT applications, infrastructure and platforms. More and more enterprises are keen to move their core processes to the cloud for all the reasons we discussed earlier. This paper explores the transition of a business critical function, SAP solutions, from on-premise to Azure in the cloud.
