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Articles November 20, 2023

Unleashing the Cloud’s Full Potential

CapTech

How an Innovation-Focused Cloud Strategy is Key to Driving Growth

Cloud computing has profoundly transformed the ways in which we manage, store, and analyze data, offering unparalleled speed, adaptability, and scalability. Perhaps most importantly, the cloud is a foundation for near-limitless digital innovation opportunities — expanded and made more accessible with new artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities. But innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. To take full advantage of the cloud, adopters must put innovation at the heart of their cloud strategy. 

Making Innovation Central to Your Cloud Strategy

With the cloud as your sandbox and innovation as your north star, a world of possibilities opens up. However, fostering an innovation mindset within your organization requires a multi-pronged approach, necessitating organizational values that encourage experimentation and promote the right tools to build, deploy, and manage cloud resources.

Build a Culture of Innovation by Starting at the Top

It’s up to leadership to make innovation their mantra and encourage, incentivize, and allow time for exploration and continuous learning. Leaders can promote the importance of innovation by stating it outright in external-facing content such as the company’s mission and vision,
as well as championing it in internal presentations, newsletters, meetings, and other communications. But leaders should also provide teams with a safe, sandboxed environment for experimentation with new cloud tools and services.

Favor Built-for-Purpose Solutions Over Best-Fit Solutions

While architecture templates and purchased solutions can have a place in your cloud strategy, your organization’s objectives must ultimately guide design decisions. For help building custom solutions, consider partnering with an expert in end-to-end cloud innovation to ensure the solutions you develop solve the unique needs of your business. CapTech’s team offers expertise in diverse areas — from people, process, and user experience to AI technology and enterprise architecture — so you can take a holistic approach to building solutions aligned with your needs.

Harness the Power of New Technologies

Taking advantage of new tools, services, and capabilities offered by cloud providers will help you streamline processes and accelerate development. Incorporating AI and ML into strategies and solutions enables faster and more timely data so you can rapidly respond to market changes, solve problems quickly, and empower your team with the information they need to ready themselves for future challenges and opportunities.

Invest in Developer Experience and Retention Strategies

Great developers want to work for innovative organizations, and innovative organizations stay innovative by employing great developers. Boosting your developer experience (DevX) by providing developers with the tools, support, and positive working environment they need to thrive helps attract and retain top talent. In return, top talent augments innovation.

Build Continuous Delivery Into Your Strategy

If you can quickly and continuously release new products and services, you’ll not only keep developers happy, but you’ll also outpace competitors. Enabling continuous delivery through the help of automated tools is critical to reducing friction, cutting expenses, and accelerating development, all while maintaining a high standard of quality. In other words, it’s an incredible innovation driver.

Realizing the Benefits of an Innovation-Focused Cloud Strategy

Building a culture of innovation creates opportunities to unlock benefits and capabilities across your organization, including boosted efficiency, improved productivity, and new sources of revenue. To see what this looks like in practice, consider these real-world examples. 

How Innovation Drove Significant Cost and Resource Savings

An international financial services and insurance provider was looking for all the benefits of the cloud to stay relevant and keep up with market trends. Working in collaboration with AWS and leveraging the CapTech Cloud Adoption Accelerator program, CapTech experts successfully delivered a well-architected, high-impact cloud foundation for innovation.

While leading the project, CapTech kept the client’s goal of innovation at the heart of the cloud migration and took a holistic approach to planning, design, and implementation. CapTech’s expertise spanned multiple organizational areas, including Management Consulting (people and process), Customer Experience (strategy, UI/UX, and mobile), and Technology (enterprise architecture, advanced data and analytics, and AI/ML).

Since the migration, the insurance provider has seen remarkable outcomes, including a nearly 40% reduction in operational costs, significantly fewer outages, and less downtime. Self-healing infrastructure and enhanced performance monitoring and alerting capabilities ensure a seamless customer experience, bolstering the company’s reputation for reliability and service excellence. These results provide more time, resources, and support for continued innovation.

How Innovation Accelerated Development and Got to Market Faster

A global technology firm hosting its software-as-a-service (SaaS) product in an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) environment engaged CapTech for help. The company wanted to migrate the solution to a platform-as-a-service, a cloud development environment cloud development environment, which is more conducive to innovation. Via the CapTech Cloud Adoption Accelerator program, the technology company seamlessly migrated its software solution, resulting in dramatic productivity enhancements and cost benefits. For example, they reduced the need for virtual machine management by 98% and increased cost efficiency by 55%. And the advanced scalability techniques improved the overall system reliability by delivering zero downtime upgrades. With CapTech’s expertise and goal of supporting innovation, the software company could take advantage of the PaaS environment’s pre-configurations, including tools, libraries, and frameworks that accelerated development.

How Innovation Quickened Response Time to New Market Demands

The sports world has not been left out of consumers’ increasing demand for digital engagement. Data-driven technologies and online platforms have become essential tools for engaging with fans and sponsors — and real-time data can enhance the digital experience. With this in mind, one of the most beloved names in racing, NASCAR®, reached out to CapTech to build a proof-of- concept (POC) cloud-based approach for competition data management. 

Utilizing AWS-native services, CapTech designed a POC featuring a centralized, relational data store, serverless microservices, and a containerized user interface to ingest, govern, and publish master competition data sets. Besides providing NASCAR with a process to manage and store data consistently, this solution makes future products and countless revenue opportunities possible.

Starting Your Transformation Through Cloud Innovation

The cloud is more than just a technology platform; it has the potential to transform your organization through innovation. But to ensure the proper foundation is in place, you must keep innovation at the core of your strategy. With the right technology, mindset, and expert partners, you can develop novel cloud-based solutions that solve real business challenges and pay dividends for years.

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