Strategic shifts: How business leaders are maximising opportunities in the current pandemic landscape

In my previous post, I laid out five trends that are driving a digital business acceleration in a pandemic-induced landscape.

Today, business leaders and strategists are planning ahead and I’m seeing two fundamental shifts in thinking – from both startups and global enterprises across a wide variety of industries.

Business modernisation needs more than a cloud-first mindset

The technology sector has been talking about the cloud for years. The benefits are known and are being realised by many. What’s stifling innovation and development in this space, is a reluctance to do much more than “lift and shift” to cloud-based infrastructure and app delivery.

The pandemic has forced the hands of organisations large and small to modernise cloud applications, operations and infrastructure. Working from core office locations has shifted dramatically to a patchwork of dispersed, remote workforces, where productivity, collaboration and the free flow of information have never been more critical.

Being cloud-first has never been more important, but it has to be more than a mindset.

Over the last year, many organisations have experienced some of the benefits of cloud adoption first-hand. Now is the time to capitalise on this tailwind — expanding strategies to containerisation and microservices to modernise monolithic legacy applications.

Take Action: Open up cloud strategies to embrace open cloud platforms, where containerisation will allow you to:

• Create and deploy applications faster and more securely
• Deliver faster time-to-market
• Increase agility and responsiveness
• Improve flexibility across hybrid- or multi-cloud infrastructures to accelerate innovation

Collaboration over control

The pandemic has pushed organisations — and their critical development and IT teams in particular — to go into survival mode, working at or beyond capacity levels for months at a time with no finish line in sight.

Workers themselves are also feeling the strain, with research showing that employees are putting in an additional 2.5 hours of work per day, on average. This has reduced employee productivity, engagement and satisfaction, and only serves to increase the risk of burnout.

As the expression says, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, bring others”. To grab market share and displace the competition, we need to be open to creating strategic partnerships with organisations that can accelerate digital transformation.

This new form of collaboration doesn’t contribute to the dreaded “vendor lock” that handcuffed IT departments a generation ago. Today’s partnerships are built around open standards, not proprietary products, giving businesses the ownership that they want over their digital business strategy, but with the flexibility and agility they need to make change happen.

TAKE ACTION: Find integration partners with the right blend of scale, expertise and real-world experience to bring disparate platforms together, so you can;

• Free up your team to drive continuous improvement and modernisation
• Quickly identify the technology stack elements best suited to your unique needs
• Become a data driven business
• Focus on your customers, your new hybrid workforce, and your biggest opportunities
• Accelerate your time to value whilst reducing development time and expenditure

Some of the most significant growth opportunities in our past history have followed times of incredible, shared difficulty and the post-pandemic world will be no different. Take action now to clear a path to success.

Persistent are leaders in enterprise modernisation and next generation product engineering. We help businesses convert their greatest challenges into competitive advantages through a blend of digital business acceleration, enterprise and core IT modernisation and innovative digital product engineering.

To learn more about how Persistent is helping customers take full advantage of the post pandemic landscape, please get in touch.

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