Being one of the biggest computing trends that impact major business sectors across the globe, the cloud has run its roots deep into business processes, bringing a new face to how organisations operate and people work in the modern era. It has changed how we behave and consume services -- a brand new model that redefines how services are created and consumed.

Cloud is the new normal and it is influencing every business in every industry and in every geography. Bringing cloud technology into businesses changes the economics of innovation. Cloud makes it cheaper and faster for businesses to simplify, modernise aging infrastructure, integrate emerging technologies into existing business systems and become data-driven. Global leaders and startups alike have realised that cloud computing could take their businesses to the next level.

With cloud, they can create and deliver compelling applications that give better end-user experiences, workflows, security and analytical capabilities to help grow revenues and reduce costs.

Industry analysts predict that more than 50 percent of all enterprise data will be managed in the cloud and 80 percent of application operations will be resolved autonomously by 2020.

The growing number of software-as-a-service applications has enabled businesses to directly acquire solutions with little or no assistance from the IT department, eliminating the need for upfront capital and reducing the lag time from decision to value from months to days.

Bangladesh's cloud transformation journey gathers momentum

Bangladesh as a market has witnessed tremendous growth in its cloud transformation drive over the last few years. From manufacturing to telecommunications, and FMCG to financial institutions, local businesses have come on board for faster innovation and business transformation through cloud applications.

Oracle Cloud has played a key role in this journey, assisting top-notch Bangladeshi organisations to modernise their business processes and systems by simplifying and standardising the performance of key business functions, including finance, supply chain, customer experience and human capital management.

Dulal Brothers, one of the largest diversified groups of companies in Bangladesh, is using Oracle Cloud applications for their end-to-end human capital management across the organisation for thousands of employees while fueling the organisation to drive strategic procurement, budgeting, and HR transformations.

Brac Bank, one of the country's leading commercial banks, has gone live on modern Oracle applications to simplify, streamline and automate its business processes with increased visibility into its financial and human resource operations.

Oracle Cloud Applications are also helping Zaber & Zubayer Ltd, a subsidiary of Noman Group, fully automate processes, enabling it to spend less time on entering and processing data and more time on analysing it while reducing back-office cost and ensuring employees are engaged and have the best employee digital experience.

The beauty of Bangladesh's cloud journey is that it has helped organisations realise the importance of moving into an Opex (operational expenditure) model from a Capex (capital expenditure) model. Many businesses have understood that it is not just about spending money on technology, but also a prime opportunity to rationalise their finance operations, which, in the long run, can have a much bigger impact on their bottom line.

Getting cloud ready

Organisations are increasingly adopting cloud-based management solutions. According to the recent IDC Vendor Spotlight survey, 50 percent of the users planning net-new IT operations analytics solutions want to move from on-premises to cloud service-delivered solutions.

Public cloud-delivered system management revenue grew 46 percent in 2016. Strong growth of public cloud-based solutions is forecasted to continue through 2020 with revenue expected to more than double from 2016 levels.

For Bangladeshi businesses, the reality is that technology-driven disruption is happening at a breakneck speed and businesses must sprint to keep up with fast-changing variables. Competitive pressures, the impact of disruptive technologies, and constantly increasing user expectations make the speed of delivery and quality of service top priorities.

A new breed of comprehensive and automated system management solutions is needed to ensure these qualities in complex, high-scale, hybrid IT environments. While some Bangladeshi companies are ready to move completely to the cloud, most desire a systematic approach – moving applications, one-by-one, to the public cloud, while retaining some mission-critical workloads on-premises.

This is particularly true for larger enterprises in banking, insurance, telecommunications and government domains, which are more restrained by tighter rules and regulations around data privacy and governance. The question is just how best to travel this journey, especially when, in most cases, enterprise customers want the best of both worlds – maximum return on investment from legacy investments and the advantages of a modern, scalable, and secure cloud infrastructure.

Indeed, a blend of on-premises and different models of cloud applications will be a key part of almost every company's cloud journey for some time to come. As such, in the first instance, Bangladeshi IT leaders today should concentrate on optimising their existing infrastructure and becoming cloud-ready, by simplifying, standardising and modernising existing on-premises infrastructure. Most importantly, business leaders have to understand how cloud applications will help their companies move forward into a state of readiness for their path to cloud innovation.

Bangladesh as a country has realised the potential cloud offers and organisations are gradually migrating their business processes and data to the cloud.

Dissatisfaction with current IT management approaches, which are often fragmented, involves substantial human interference and silo-based, is a prominent reason for many companies in Bangladesh to consider adopting cloud-based management solutions.

In that sense, a comprehensive cloud suite like the Oracle Cloud will enable customers to extend, enrich, and customise their application environments with unprecedented intelligence, security, speed, and predictability. New cloud offerings like 'Soar to the Cloud'—the world's first automated enterprise cloud application upgrade product—will enable customers to reduce the time and cost of cloud migration by up to 30 percent.

Moving forward, local organisations which are willing to embrace cloud should closely evaluate their state of 'cloud readiness', adopt cloud applications smartly into their business processes and innovate at a rapid pace as there will be more changes ahead. Increasingly, customer interactions will start with conversational intelligent chatbots, cloud-based artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies will be used to spot patterns and anomalies across vast volumes of data. Also a new generation of business applications built on blockchain will change the pace of local businesses significantly in years to come.

The author is head of application at Oracle Bangladesh, Nepal & Bhutan.