Latin American companies are increasingly turning to cloud computing services for greater efficiency and agility at a lower cost. Although the novelty has worn off and it has clearly settled as a trend, migration is still slow for growing companies in the region. Nevertheless, there are solutions and offerings that make the journey to the cloud easier and technology partners that help in the transition.
In the past three years, the business of enterprise cloud services has undergone astronomical growth all over the world. More and more companies are looking to cloud services to update, remain competitive, and improve their profitability, without relying on physical servers or on a great investment in infrastructure.
This gained momentum in early 2020 with the Covid-19 health crisis, which forced companies to accelerate their digital transformation and turned the cloud into a vital tool for business continuity, remote work, and learning, and also to keep customer engagement across different businesses.
Adoption in Latin America is sky-high
Today the number of companies with cloud services is still very high. And everything suggests that cloud computing will still shape the technology landscape in the near future.
In Latin America, this trend is growing stronger and stronger. Gartner, a consultancy firm specialized in information technology, foresees that in 2022 revenues from the cloud will amount to 474 billion dollars, up from the 408 billion recorded for 2021.
Moreover, a report by global consultancy firm International Data Corporation (IDC) points out that cloud services in the region will grow by 30.4% in 2023, while the IDC FutureScape survey predicts that 80% of the companies will use cloud storage services by the same year.
“Latin America is a region with many challenges ahead in terms of applications, in which systems often do not support one another. The tendency towards blended work will go on. In some cases, remote work may be feasible, whereas in others returning to the office will be more suitable. But the investment and implementation carried out on this type of technology does not prevent from using a blended model for different areas”, says Enrique Phun, Senior Software Analyst at IDC Latin America.
Migrating to cloud platforms: Why is it a trend?
This growth can be explained: enterprises have understood this is not a workaround, but a change in paradigm that will bring about important short-, medium- and long-term benefits, with technology as a core partner on the way towards more modern and competitive systems.
For companies, the key is to adopt cloud-native platforms, with the aim of automating processes, having higher data visibility, being better prepared for contingencies, and gaining greater business agility.
Optimizing costs is another benefit. Companies adopting cloud computing tools will see significant savings on their budgets. Using cloud solutions will reduce investments in capital goods (such as hardware, computers, data centres, maintenance, etc.), which involve down payments and the assessment of their durability and their replacement and update costs.
Why? Because in the cloud, companies will only pay for what they use and for the time they use it. Moreover, they will have access to tools, applications, or solutions they couldn’t have dreamt of, at a low and variable cost that is easy to schedule, enable and disable, as needed.
Also, the adoption of the public cloud usually reduces the carbon footprint, which represents an important element for the environmental and sustainability strategies of businesses: cloud infrastructure can be up to three or four times more energy efficient.
The sky is the limit for technology
The potential of cloud services has no limits. The ones presently offered to make it possible to gather data management, application development, and automation in a unified environment. And they include innovative tools such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotic process automation.
Nonetheless, when deciding to move to the cloud, companies need a clear understanding of what their business wants to achieve so that they can plan an appropriate migration strategy, identify what systems and applications to upload, and what kind of cloud is the most convenient for them, and what benefits to expect for the company.
In most medium-sized or growing companies, technological environments are complex. They have rigid systems, making it difficult to rapidly and profitably innovate to respond to market changes and customer demands. Besides, the need to avoid interrupting the supply chain and increasing sustainability imperatives leads companies to more complex management processes when everything is on-premise. Thus, migration is no longer an option but a requirement for survival.
Deciding who and what to start the journey with
In this context, once the decision to start or accelerate the digital transformation has been taken, companies will need a technology partner to facilitate and speed up the journey to the cloud, regardless of how digitally mature they might be.
Another sine qua non-condition is to look for the most suitable solutions for their needs. An example of versatility for this transition towards a “smart company” is the end-to-end cloud computing solution offered by SAP through its
SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP). This platform helps companies connect processes and experiences to take informed decisions on their data management, analytics, artificial intelligence, the internet of things, blockchain technology, and application development and integration services on an open platform in the cloud.
Therefore, SAP launched a solution to support these processes and improve migration to the cloud (RISE with SAP) at the pace and in the way that best suit each company. To carry this out SAP relies on internationally prestigious business partners with vast experience in technological implementations, such as SEIDOR, which is a member of United VARs, an exclusive group of leading providers of global SAP implementations, all of which gives customers reassurance and support from those who know what they do and how they do it.
The best is yet to be
The future looks bright: more and more companies are deciding the cloud is the best way to integrate their platforms, grow and develop.
According to a survey of IT global professionals carried out by consultancy firm Enterprise Strategy Group, 83% of the respondents say that improving business integration is a top priority for the next two years. Only 27% have some kind of practice or experience in business integration. And 55% state they have already started moving towards that transformation, by forming work teams within their own organizations.
Likewise, a global report by Check Point Software Technologies shows that 57% of the companies expect to deploy more than half of their workloads in a cloud-native environment in the next 12 to 18 months and 76% of them use two or more cloud service providers. And 75% of the companies wish to have a single unified platform in which they can set up all the necessary policies to manage and protect their data.
This is a huge challenge for companies. The success of their business will substantially depend upon their ability to adapt to the new cloud technologies.
stronger than one