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The Cloud as a Supporting Enabler for Economic Reactivation

By Maribel Dos Santos - Oracle Mexico
Senior Vice President and Managing Director

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Maribel Dos Santos By Maribel Dos Santos | Senior Vice President and Managing Director - Tue, 01/10/2023 - 12:00

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If I have learned something during my career, it is that technology should not be questioned but embraced due to its power to provide infinite possibilities in any branch that uses it. It is not news to anyone that technology has come from being a business resource to a base necessity. A few decades ago, digital transformation was considered part of a business' expansion plans, knowing that it would come sooner or later. Today and with the pandemic receding, things have changed. What was supposed to take five  to 10 years to implement and consolidate was reduced to a time-breaking record of one year to keep the economy of millions of businesses afloat globally.

One of the most important aspects — if not the most important — to consider is the necessity of the clients; in any case, they are never the same. It is here where technology providers need to be the best allies and provide genuine and efficient products that help build strong businesses. According to a study by IDC (2022), 41 percent of the organizations in Latin America hope that up to 25 percent of their incomes will be gained digitally. By 2025, 40 percent even hopes to increase that up to 50 percent of what was supposed to be data loading and amplified actions.

Citing the same IDC study, 49 percent of companies are considering using collaboration technologies (in Mexico, in 2022, 91 percent will be implemented in the cloud) for better communication inside and outside the organization; likewise, 53 percent of businesses recur to technology and cloud services to reduce the dependency on physical storage.

In the context of a true accelerated digital transformation resulting from the pandemic, the cloud regions play a crucial role in economic reactivation. They enable flexibility for companies to continue being competitive and to benefit from variable costs for managing their data and applications, employing a minor inversion of what their physical infrastructure represents.

On the other hand, an excellent strategic last-generation cloud service provider with high reliability allows business continuity and the innovation and development of business lines.

Businesses currently focused on assigning part of their resources to infrastructures that require maintenance and personnel "in house" to oversee  it, as well as periodic updates, should focus on their core business instead to become more productive and efficient, dedicating resources to innovate their products and services.

For their part, the cloud solutions allow IT areas of businesses to center their value on innovative projects instead of being forced to dedicate most of their time to the maintenance and update of their technological infrastructure, especially considering that in the next five years, 56 percent of organizations will depend on digital resources to deliver products and services.

It is a fact that digital transformation is fundamental for businesses to maintain their position or make their way in more competitive markets. That is where the enterprises that dedicate themselves to technology must focus, investing in the qualification of local cloud regions and assuming our technologies' critical role as support in the economic reactivation.

All the benefits that the cloud represents for large businesses also represent an important innovation opportunity for small and medium-sized enterprises, which today are an essential cog in the economy's engine in several Latin American countries.

The foremost opportunity for the segment of small and medium-sized companies in all industries lies in the possibility of being born and growing with cloud-native technological strategies, allowing them to create entirely digital processes as the basis for product development as well as innovative, personalized, and scalable services. It is a practical framework applied to the new consumption models developed throughout the pandemic and shaped by a combination of preferences that integrate traditional models with digital products and services that are in demand as the world overcomes the most challenging stages of this era.

It is just when we observe the level of incidence that cloud technologies have at this level of innovation and business development that we may say that cloud technology has arrived to democratize the latest generation of technological improvements and advancement that are within reach of all companies, regardless of their size or the industries to which they belong.

This infrastructure delivered as a service also opens the door to the broader use of other emerging technologies that we see rapidly developing and that still have a long way to go. The internet of things, artificial intelligence, machine learning, data analytics, blockchain, and metaverses, among others, will be the gateways to the transformation rooms of total consumption, interaction, and even economic models that are yet to be known.

For this reason, the digital transformation process, although it begins more visibly in the business arena and among economic entities, will pave the way for an economic reactivation based not only on the transactions of products and services, but also on the complete reconfiguration of the dynamics of consumption, spending and models of social interaction with technologies integrated into the daily life of human society at increasingly fundamental levels.

Photo by:   Maribel Dos Santos

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