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Cloud Computing: The emergence of Digitization in medium-sized companies
Firms of all sizes, across all sectors, and around the globe are increasingly filling digital adoption gaps and equipping their staff with digital tools. Even small and medium-sized companies, that use to see digitization as a burden have significantly increased their digital technologies’ adoption. Already in 2021, small businesses accelerated their digital investments so they could survive prolonged COVID-19 pandemic restrictions. According to a new update to the International Data Corporation (IDC), the global spending on the digital transformation (DX) of business practices, products, and organizations is forecast to reach $1.8 trillion in 2022, an increase of 17.6% over 2021.
Digitization offers great advantages, such as the development of new business areas and larger, international customer bases by integrating into global markets. Provides better and quicker access to information, and communication between staff, suppliers, and networks Digitalisation also supports innovation, generates data, and analyzes their own operations in a new way & driving improved performance. According to IDC, at least 20 percent of small businesses globally will cease operations by 2025 if they don’t digitize fast enough.
At this point, SMEs must embark on digital transformation projects to accelerate their post-crisis recovery but also due to the emergence of a younger, more technologically perceptive generation.
The introduction of new technologies within companies must be done with well-thought planning. A digital project is time-consuming and requires appropriate skills and know-how. The growing numbers of digital companies show that the journey is worthwhile. Zoho, the Global tech company, therefore advises small and medium-sized businesses to take the following steps on their digitization agenda:
Don’t ignore the power of the cloud: The time to rely on classic IT infrastructures is over for cost reasons alone: Clouds are significantly cheaper in terms of value for money than legacy systems in your own company. Mainly because companies don’t have to invest in their own server infrastructure. Also, organizations don’t need to worry about data storage and protection resources and costs as the cloud world offers extensive scalability. A scalable cloud can grow and manage the increasing demands of processing, along with ensuring that data, applications, and services are available at any time and from anywhere via the Internet and updates them in real-time. Digitization can simply not be achieved without implementing the cloud into your infrastructure.
Sustainable technologies: The pandemic has given medium-sized companies a boost in digitization: SMEs, like all other companies, have had to react to the imposed home office requirements. However, many companies have acted hastily when it comes to software and have opted for “short-term” digitalization aka temporary isolated solutions. In order to make their working models futuristic, they must think and adopt a long-term digitalization process in order to transform their business model from analog to digital. Instead of relying on/investing in short-term solutions, SMEs must understand and enable sustainable digitalization.
Focus on automation: Automation has already proven its benefits in previous technological revolutions. Automation reduces the number of process interruptions and usually leads to higher performance and a lower error rate. Automation thanks to digitization is possible in every SME and is also implemented continuously. Classic examples are approval and verification processes, which can be digitized from manual tasks to rule-based, program-controlled, and thus automatic tasks. SMEs that want to digitize are well-advised to find process interruptions and to determine the cost/benefit ratio of automation through digitization. Automation should be an ongoing task considering the ever-improving digital tools.
Digitization is reality. Of course, also in the SME sector. And it is a challenge since it can usually only be achieved through the cooperation of several companies, partners, and companies’ own workforce. Every SME can make rapid progress with the right digitization strategy. The experts at Xorlogics will be happy to support and guide you in your company’s digital transformation project!