Business agility is the ability of a business to modernize, adapt, and scale quickly with changing market conditions and the business environment with cost-effectiveness.
When we think of market disruptors, names like Airbnb, Netflix, and Lyft immediately come to mind. These innovators have redefined industries with their agility, leveraging cloud technology to innovate and scale rapidly. In today's interconnected world, where the metaverse concept is gaining traction, agility is paramount.
Companies are racing to scale globally, and operational excellence alone is not enough. Continuous improvement in user experience, relentless innovation, and speed to market are now the gold standards.
Business agility is an organization’s ability to modernize, adapt, and scale quickly and cost-effectively to changing market conditions and the business environment. By doing so, the organization sees consistent (or even exponential) revenue growth, an expanded user base, enhanced user experience, faster innovations, risk minimization, and reduced costs, among other benefits.
Agility is critical to achieving key business objectives.
Since access to technology is no longer a barrier now, any company that can truly become an agile business has the power to disrupt any market segment and eat into corporate giants’ market share. So now, regardless of the nature and size of the company, businesses have to modernize their infrastructure, products, and services and continuously adopt new technologies to remain relevant in the market.
Cloud, as we know it, has become a true technology enabler and, more importantly, so for agility. Adopting the cloud is one of the most significant steps in achieving business agility and improving strategic decisions. Forward-thinking business leaders are transforming their businesses by deploying strategic cloud computing, from operations to offerings. Here is how cloud adoption helps build the foundation for agility:
Business transformation involves changes in or entirely new business processes. This, in turn, requires the deployment of new IT resources quickly, efficiently, and at scale. Cloud adoption helps businesses easily deploy IT resources to implement and support their business processes.
With cloud adoption, any business can use futuristic technologies such as AI, ML, Blockchain, VR, and more. Cloud providers offer out-of-the-box offerings that allow you to experiment, build, and embed these technologies in your applications fairly quickly. With the cloud, the sky is the limit for innovations.
Investing in IT resources upfront and deploying infrastructure during the first few weeks or months is now obsolete. Cloud adoption helps businesses deploy computing resources anytime within hours or minutes and pay only for the resources consumed.
Cloud adoption significantly reduces IT spending, with no upfront cost and a pay-as-you-go model. Additionally, resource usage analytics and real-time monitoring help businesses optimize their IT costs. Startups and SMEs can benefit from managed services to build prototypes and conduct experimentation without investing heavily initially.
Cloud computing removes the burden of transitional IT infrastructure deployment and management with SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS offerings, so businesses (even technology companies) can focus on their core operations. Individuals can start their businesses with cloud computing resources without hiring an IT team.
Cloud adoption empowers all stakeholders, from management to IT, by giving them the power to quickly respond to market changes and become agile in their job. And when people become agile, the whole organization becomes agile, digital transformation becomes a success, and the business becomes a disruptor.
