The shift towards cloud adoption continues to gain momentum as we see IT environments shift from on-premisses to mostly cloud. The 2020 IDG Cloud Computing research, which looks into cloud usage and adoptions plans, investments and business drivers behind the technology, shows that cloud adoption is embedded into most organization's business strategy, as 92% say that some of their infrastructure is in the cloud to some extent. Forecasts show that in the next 18 months 95% of organizations will look to be either fully or partially in the cloud.

When organizations were asked, only 9% said that their organization is fully in the cloud, and this is expected to grow to 16% in the next 18 months.

Organizations forced to adapt

The impact on the retail sector due to the COVID-19 pandemic has been dramatic and touched every part of retailers’ business models—an overnight shift to full reliance on digital channels, disruption and lags in supply chains, and a completely new way of working for teams. A shift towards an investment in an organization's IT infrastructure and specifically cloud computing is instrumental in helping build the resilience the business needed to bounce back after the pandemic.

The covid-19 pandemic offers a unique opportunity for leaders to reassess business strategies, especially as the cloud has become an imperative for businesses of all sizes to accelerate their digital transformation.

Cloud transformation will not only provide firms with capabilities to recover from the crisis more quickly, it might serve as strategic lever, allowing business leaders to rethink priorities and resource allocation.

Sitecore and Azure Cloud Computing

Moving or instantiating your Sitecore application into Azure's cloud can offer many advantages.

1. It is extremely easy to set up

2. Scaling the application as your business and IT needs continue to grow can be set up through configuration modules.

3. For many marketers, seasonality, campaigns or other factors can impact the overall performance of your web properties. With the cloud, unlimited capacity is available at your fingertips allowing automatic scaling of the environment based on the current needs and demands. Since most cloud services are charged on a consumption based model, you only pay for what you use.

4. Frees your IT organization to focus on other important business strategies since your application is maintained in the cloud.

5. The low cost subscription model of cloud services not only makes it easy and quick to get up and running but also allows you to more effectively budget for initiatives throughout the year. Just be aware of your consumption levels and adjust monthly to meet your business needs. You can also use automated scaling rules to identify the perfect time to adjust resources. Cloud hosting your Sitecore application will always be more cost effective. You Sitecore subscription model allows you to pay for the services you need and when you need them. Sitecore’s distributed architecture means that you can focus resources exactly where needed.

6. Cloud services have been developed with a secure-by-default approach meaning you gain multiple levels of security protection built-in across the platform. Resilience and disaster recovery can often be added through a few clicks by adding in additional instances or replication across global infrastructures.

7. Leveraging machine learning, data and analytics in order to understand how customers are interacting with your organization will better prepare an organization to stay competitive. With cloud computing at your disposal, you now have the ability to extract insight and information on customer behaviors making it more precise on how an organization's business decisions are made.

If your organization is currently on a Sitecore perpetual license, then now is the time to consider migrating to the cloud. Innate Theory can help review your current implementation and plan a roadmap of how best to achieve the migration. Moving to the cloud will require you to be on the latest version of Sitecore. There are a number of elements to consider in the migration, but it could also be an opportunity to improve or clean up legacy issues with the platform.