WashingtonExec has reached out to leading GovCon cloud executives about the latest trends in a post-pandemic world. These interviews highlight success stories that resonate, discuss how organizations are navigating current challenges and provide insight into lessons learned.
Randy Shore, vice president of delivery and support for Kion, shares his thoughts below.
Did the pandemic accelerate digital transformation efforts in your organization or with customers? If so, how did you/your team approach this, and how did cloud play a role?
Absolutely. The shift to remote working served as a catalyst for much-needed digital transformation initiatives. And many digital transformation initiatives were centered around information technology transformations ⏤ primarily the scalability and self-servicing functionality of this area.
As a result, a lot of organizations were kickstarting their cloud adoption and migration efforts, and many of our customers were looking to scale their cloud usage. Not only were they looking to scale exponentially, but they were looking to do so fairly quickly. When a big undertaking, such as a cloud migration, is done via a rush job and there is a lack of visibility, a lot of mistakes can be made.
Our approach was to combine all of the benefits of cloud governance and cloud management to provide a holistic view into an organization’s cloud environments across all of the cloud service providers they use, providing insights on cloud spend, access privileges, compliance findings and more.
How do you hope current or ongoing digital transformation initiatives positively impact the organization and its customers?
There are a lot of hidden benefits to digital transformation and cloud adoption initiatives that organizations can achieve. Yes, digital transformation presents unique opportunities to enhance product capabilities as well as employee and customer experience, but there are other positive impacts that I hope organizations tap into. Most of these benefits are directly correlated to cloud usage and include:
Reducing carbon footprint. Thanks to digital transformation, organizations are no longer attempting to maintain their own data centers. These workloads are now running in data centers hosted by public cloud providers, allowing organizations to better manage performance across multiple time zones and reduce their carbon footprint.
Eliminating overhead costs. Companies no longer have to shell out extra funds to run on-prem infrastructure or hire additional personnel to manage and run these infrastructures.
Supporting onboarding and retention of IT staff. Many digital transformation initiatives are closing the skills gap that plagues the industry by allowing them to work in applications and public infrastructure that is familiar to them.
How do you/your team prepare customers for digital transformation trends of the future?
Regardless of where digital transformation initiatives take us in the future, it is important to remember the missteps that ultimately stop these projects in their tracks ⏤ security and compliance gaps and blown budgets. When a GDPR violation occurs or the finance team is hit with a massive bill, the entire project is at a standstill until the issue is resolved.
It is imperative to put the preventive guardrails in place now so that spending doesn’t exceed a certain threshold, nor does a data breach occur that places the company’s reputation at risk or results in a lawsuit or massive fine. These preparations will allow for seamless and continuous digital transformations to occur, and that is one of our primary focuses that we work with customers on.
What are some of the biggest digital transformation trends you are anticipating for the remainder of this year, and into 2023?
With the outlook on the economy in 2023, I anticipate many organizations favoring a “do more with less” approach. Unfortunately, because of the pay-as-you-go nature of the cloud, many organizations see a ramp-up of expenses with digital transformation before recognizing the efficiencies the cloud can bring. Because of this, one area I think organizations should be focusing on is business process automation. This will allow organizations to move in a more agile fashion with less resources and navigate the waves ahead.
There is no better platform for automation, however, than the cloud. If an organization can embrace these and leverage things like AWS Lambda and other serverless technologies, automation can run for mere fractions of a dollar if done well. Investing time to inherit this benefit would pay in dividends to these organizations.
What are you most passionate about enhancing cloud-wise in your organization going forward for internal teams and/or for customers?
As an independent software vendor running within native cloud environments, continuing to innovate around new cloud services is always a passion of ours. As we look to better support customers across multiple cloud providers, embracing and leveraging cloud-agnostic technologies, like Kubernetes, is a strong initiative for us right now.
Not only will this benefit our customers looking to host across environments; it will also allow the application to perform in a more elastic fashion, allowing us to increase performance and provide a better user experience.
In addition to this, looking at ways to leverage some of the newer cloud APIs from Google or the Cloud Control API from AWS are also areas of focus to help us simplify and streamline our code base to provide more rich insights and data to our customers.