With a drastic increase in cloud- computing adoption, cloud-specific spending is expected to grow six times more than the rate of general IT spending by 2020. Though large organizations have implemented SaaS solutions or adopted cloud strategies, many still struggle to get the complete value of moving the bulk of their enterprise systems to the cloud. This is due to the trap of ‘confusing moving IT systems’ that companies tend to fall into. Taking legacy applications and moving it to the cloud—“lift-and-shift” — will not yield benefits that cloud systems and infrastructure can provide.

The value of cloud comes from approaching holistic strategies to pursue digital transformation. Such strategies are enabled by automation and standardization of the IT environment through open API models, working in automated operating models, adopting modern security postures, and leveraging new capabilities to drive innovative business solutions. Though cloud is not a prerequisite for these features, it does act as a force multiplier. Companies that look at the capabilities of cloud in this way tend to create a next-generation IT capable of ensuring business growth and innovation in the fast-evolving digital age.

Cloud adoption is a massive enabler of the necessary standardization and automation. With cloud, companies have numerous benefits:

• Overhead costs of IT can be reduced by 30 to 40 percent.

• IT processes can be scaled, optimizing IT asset usage.

• The overall flexibility of IT in meeting business needs can be improved, enabling cloud providers to offer sophisticated solutions such as big-data and machine learning services apart from basic computing and storage.

• The “self-healing” nature of the standard solutions helps increase the quality of service, for instance, allocating more storage to a database automatically. Enterprises have been seen to reduce IT incidents by 70 percent by using cloud computing.

A certain level of remediation is required to make IT systems more cloud-oriented.