| |NOVEMBER 20219CIOs and Chief Digital Officers looking to drive large scale digital transfor-mation initiatives will significantly benefit from the scalability and flex-ibility of the cloud. With faster provi-sioning of compute and storage and no CAPEX requirement, manufacturers can accelerate innovation since the time to production is reduced drasti-cally. Furthermore, the cost savings from cloud deployment can be divert-ed towards building new solutions and applications.WHAT'S IN THEIR WAY?There are some challenges that CIOs and Chief Digital Officers may face while adopting cloud solutions. The top ones being data security, interop-erability, and vendor lock-in. These concerns are compounded when you consider the length and breadth of the manufacturing value chain and the number of stakeholders within the ecosystem ­ all using disparate applications and data formats. Also, the terabytes of transactional and operational data generated daily re-quire tamper-proof storage and must be easily retrievable. CIOs and Chief Digital Officers may worry about the latency while processing high-volume transactions and mining data in the cloud. This concern is especially gen-uine because manufacturers have re-lied on on-premise infrastructure and highly-customized monolithic ERP applications for decades, and there might be significant organizational inertia while making a move to the cloud. There is also the hesitation of being dependent on a single cloud pro-vider for resource provisioning and technology enhancements.Most of those concerns can be al-leviated by recognizing the advance-ment in cloud technology. While the first phase of cloudification may in-volve the migration of non-critical workloads to the cloud, the real ben-efits can only be experienced by going cloud-native. That means that com-panies need to build and run applica-tions on the cloud and adopt DevOps and cloud-native architectures to drive continuous improvements and enhance application performance. Further, CIOs and Chief Digital Of-ficers can also optimize their cloud costs and reduce vendor lock-in by us-ing cloud solutions from multiple pro-viders and picking the best that each vendor has to offer. And based on their risk appetite and specific business requirements, they may choose the most appropriate cloud deployment model ­ public, private, or hybrid ­ each providing different levels of flex-ibility, customizability, and control. Adopting cloud solutions and unlock-ing their real value would necessitate manufacturing CIOs and Chief Digital Officers to focus on building a robust API strategy. The execution of this strategy would promote interopera-bility, deploy proven integration mid-dleware for operating a multi-cloud environment, and bolstering data se-curity processes and governance pro-cesses. HOW IS CLOUD HELPING REALIZE MANUFAC-TURING 4.0?Early adopters and innovators in the manufacturing space are beginning to witness the transformational ben-efits of the cloud. The most significant way in which cloud impacts manufac-turers is by enabling innovation and promoting the adoption of the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) technolo-gies. Cloud allows IT teams to quickly provision infrastructure, build proofs of concept, showcase the business val-ue of novel solutions, and move those to production seamlessly leveraging the superior scalability of the cloud. With on-premise infrastructure, gaining access to resources would be a time-consuming, costly, and of-ten bureaucratic process. Long story short, adoption of the cloud strategy is democratizing innovation. More-over, in a highly globalized business environment, the cloud provides the necessary tools for collaboration, al-lowing developers from any geogra-phy to participate in digitalization projects. As more and more companies embrace cloud technology, legacy on-shore applications will be replaced with cloud-native applications tightly integrated with rapidly evolving tech-nologies ­ such as machine learning, the Internet of Things, artificial intel-ligence, and data analytics. That will pave the way for ERPs to transform from `tools for efficiency' to `tools for strategic decision making.' The most significant way in which cloud impacts manufacturers is by enabling innovation and promoting the adoption of the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) technologies
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