Digital Transformation Challenges

Embrace help from service providers to deliver the benefits

For many midsized enterprises, there is a significant mismatch between their goals and their ability to take advantage of all the new capabilities available to them in the ecosystem that has grown up around the cloud.

Seventy-three percent of enterprises 451 Research surveys are pushing ahead with cloud migration and modernization, with about 29% in full production and the rest in deployment, planning or piloting.

It’s not a magical journey. Our research also shows that most enterprises need about four years to convert the majority of their production application to a cloud environment.

When we speak with midsized enterprises – those with 250-1,000 employees – we find that journey can be longer and more onerous because these businesses typically have less access to modern IT talent and are often further behind the curve on even the ‘legacy’ hardware and software running their businesses.

That’s why specialized third-party service providers, many of them the next generation of the businesses that set up midsized companies’ IT operations in the first place, can be valuable partners.

What to look for in a service provider

Unlike traditional outsourcing, today’s IT services are not about replacing stuff and staff (remember “your mess for less?”) and squeezing out budget year over year. IT service providers should be able to show that they can be a cost-effective way to make IT a vital investment again, and bridge the gap between a vision of better IT operations (and all that neat stuff in the cloud) and a lack of time or manpower.

The best service providers will work with you to first review your application portfolio and help you prioritize which workloads and processes to modernize based on your business priorities. Before any work begins, they should show a willingness to invest some time in this advisory role.

Other critical capabilities to look for include: experience with multiple cloud types, professional services teams that can help with application migrations, and software development teams current on the latest methodologies.

Additional Resources: