The world of business is evolving quickly—and the cloud is powering the change. More and more organizations are seeking solutions that accelerate the integration of their cloud environment.
So far, many have taken a pragmatic but fragmented approach in their cloud journey.
They’ve embraced:
- Software as a service (SaaS) as a convenient but siloed way to consume standard application functionality
- Platform as a service (PaaS) as a way to iteratively build new differentiating functions
- Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to run current and legacy systems with minimal change
But this divide-and-conquer approach to the cloud has kept organizations from realizing the full value of their technology investments and created barriers to meeting today’s evolving customer and business needs.1
1 Source: Leverage Gartner's Vertical Strategy Framework for Composable Industry Cloud Offerings
Industry Cloud: Refine and reinvent your business model
A holistic approach: where cloud-powered companies will focus next
The next frontier in digital transformation involves bringing hardware and software together in the cloud—along with cloud-native capabilities—to help solve business challenges. Industry cloud solutions will make this shift possible. These pre-built offerings are tailored to a sector’s unique business processes, regulatory requirements and customer needs. They can also provide a seamless pathway to accessing your broader ecosystem. Through a composable and modular approach, industry cloud solutions allow enterprises to develop streamlined architecture. An architecture that connects key business applications, core business systems and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and technology providers in a common, consistent, resilient and scalable way.
Cloud-powered companies are much more likely to have an enterprise-wide data strategy than other companies (88% versus 59%) and are focused on seamless integration with their cloud service providers (CSPs).
Top three cloud integration challenges –– and how to overcome them
Enabling a more holistic approach to cloud strategy requires integration. However, enterprise system integration has been historically fraught with three primary challenges:
- 1. Connectivity
- 2. Security
- 3. Agility
1. Connectivity
In order to build event-driven customer journeys across platforms, organizations need the ability to connect their core systems and front, middle and back office operations. However, many grapple with slow, inflexible legacy technology or have a multi-cloud strategy that uses services from multiple vendors, including cloud service providers (CSPs) like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. This can hinder their ability to innovate and may cause them to spend significant cost and time to meet the complexity needed to form a large-scale, production-grade enterprise system.
Solution:
Utilize a cloud solution with pre-configured connections already designed to integrate with leading CSPs and core industry systems. Reduce costs and help improve connectivity across disparate systems with a common execution plane that helps integrate a broad variety of cloud and on-premise applications. Easily facilitate hybrid data flows, synchronize data, improve operational workflows and gain better visibility.
2. Security
Data in the cloud must be protected, but maintaining security configurations across cloud services can be difficult. A secure enterprise cloud solution needs to include functionality for user authentication and authorization, data encryption and data backup.
Solution:
Define security in one place and enforce it across your interacting systems. Put verification and authentication procedures in place for various data flows streaming in from, and out of, all your business services and vendor platforms.
3. Agility
Many industries face unprecedented disruptions from geopolitical and economic forces and emerging technologies like AI. In order to meet evolving needs, enterprises need reliable cloud solutions that allow them to easily transition to modern business applications — and integrate third-party solutions into their ecosystem without interrupting business or creating negative customer experiences.
Solution:
Get a flexible solution that includes PwC’s consulting knowledge and configurable assets, low-code configuration and event choreography (e.g., the interactions between multiple services) to help accelerate adoption without impacting operations. Gain the ability to create reusable assets so you can help strengthen your organization's resilience and agility during changing times.
What is Cloud Intelligence?
PwC has built an innovative solution that helps meet all three cloud integration challenges. Cloud Intelligence, an event-driven platform, streamlines the connectivity between key systems that help drive your business, accelerating your journey to the cloud while delivering enhanced security and business continuity. It’s serverless, low-code and configuration-driven to help enable you to quickly design, build and test end-to-end customer journeys—at scale and natively in your preferred CSP.
Through Cloud Intelligence-led connectivity, services from ERPs and core business applications can be integrated to create an enriched customer experience that is personalized, contextual, relevant and delivered at the right time to the right channel. With a strong connective infrastructure now in place, businesses can create reusable assets which allow for more rapid project delivery—increasing the speed to market and reducing development costs while being able to respond faster to customer demand.
Driving connected customer experiences: a retail bank use case
To drive the seamless experience that today’s customers expect, organizations need core business capabilities around event choreography. Through Cloud Intelligence’s collection of components, they can define the event-driven journeys that account for dynamically changing customer needs and personalize service to meet expectations.
Take the example of opening a bank account. You receive an email offer to open an account, you like the offer details and act on it by authenticating yourself into the banking app where your information is already pre-filled. You review the information and upon clicking submit, you receive confirmation that the new account has been opened with the account number, type of account and balance. It’s a simple, fast and intuitive process.
When looking at the same journey from the bank’s perspective, there are a wide variety of core services, support functions and compliance functions that must be digitized and integrated to provide these end user features. To create a seamless customer experience in the cloud, organizations need to be able to choreograph how these various solutions come together. With Cloud Intelligence, they’re able to select and build the bank account experience through drag-and-drop components that help define event-driven journeys and integrate their deposits core.
Future-proof your organization with an end-to-end cloud solution
Companies should be cloud-powered to stay competitive. The benefits are undeniable: 100% of cloud-powered companies can improve their decision making through cloud transformation. And they’re twice as likely to take a multi-faceted cloud approach, including moving operations to the cloud and implementing industry cloud solutions.
The next generation of cloud solutions will need to integrate fragmented systems and applications to break down silos and transform the customer experience. Through Industry Cloud’s flexible architecture, your organization can launch cloud-native, pre-built assets as a replacement to—or in parallel with—existing systems, to help reduce the time, expense and regulatory risk associated with modernizing your core technology.
In order to get the full value from your cloud investments, you’ll need to optimize for connectivity—and Cloud Intelligence can help. With new and legacy technology integrated seamlessly together, your business will be ready to address shifting market dynamics and drive sustainable innovation, now and in the future.
