Moving to the cloud: 4 questions to consider before starting

This blog offers a concise roadmap with 4 tailored questions for the automotive and mobility industry, crucial for cloud-native adoption. Let’s lay out the groundwork first. What should a cloud-native strategy bring to the table for you?

A cloud-based solution should allow you to:

1. Optimize your internal processes while enhancing automation and digitalization
2. Market and scale your complete product scope in a flexible way
3. Make qualitative and data-driven decisions in a secure environment
4. Enhance your customer experience while staying on top of innovative financing solutions

Ultimately, moving to the cloud should empower you to focus on your core business: providing your customers with the best mobility solutions and services. It should not keep you awake at night, that’s for sure.

Before deciding on the right cloud-based solutions, let’s first delve into 4 questions that will empower you in your quest for a cloud-based approach.

Always on, always available, everywhere. Cloud solutions provide always-on applications with near-zero downtime and availability for your customers. No need to worry about the performance of your infrastructure, technical hick-ups or platform updates. The systems are highly resilient and keep your organization immune to volume demand spikes or lower capacity. A cloud platform with no downtime truly is an economic driver for your company. You can shift around any workload and grow without surprise costs or overruns.

To stay ahead of the pack, you want to be free from laborious, ineffective and manual processes. In this rapidly changing environment, you want to optimize your business processes. So, ask yourself: will these processes still be adaptable in 5 years? It’s good to keep this question in mind while evaluating options for optimization. The power to configure your application allows you to easily and quickly meet any challenges or opportunities that come your way, even unplanned and urgent needs. Cloud-based solutions significantly have a higher level of configurability than their physical counterparts. This liberates cloud users from time-consuming, costly (external) development for custom processes. Just think about custom pricing and contract management…

All organizations have multiple applications and technologies supporting their operations such as CRM, sales tools, POS systems, and supply chain systems… In line with current evolutions, most of these are already cloud-based. Obviously, your business platforms – the beating heart of your organization – cannot stay behind. Cloud-based solutions have powerful native integrations and orchestration capabilities, supporting end-to-end processes and extensibility. By making sure your interoperability and extensibility is up to speed first, you create a solid foundation that helps you to innovate at your own pace. After all, a high level of integration helps you to consolidate costly, niche systems and launch unique organizational or industrial innovations to keep you in a market-leading position.

Security is key. Your security needs to be proactive, easy to manage, and as responsive as the systems and applications you’re protecting. While the security of many legacy systems was bolted on after the product was conceived, cloud vendors have built-in auditability and security from the start. The result? You save time and resources because you don’t have to continuously catch up with the latest security trends and investments.