The METISfiles presented at the Box Launch Event in Amsterdam last week. Secure content platform provider Box is expanding in EMEA and Box Amsterdam will serve as the regional headquarters for the Benelux and Northern European countries. Our presentation focused on Digital Transformation and the Cloud.
Digital transformation is enabled by social, mobile, analytics and the cloud and is about digitizing products, processes and people. Because of the increasing speed at which this transformation is occurring, the shelf life of business models is shortening resulting in digital disruption and changing customer behaviour. Companies like Uber, Airbnb, Spotify, Netflix and Whatsapp are prime examples of disruption in the transportation, hospitality, entertainment and telecommunication markets. Digital transformation is an extremely/very important theme in the future plans of their clients say nearly 80% of surveyed digital agencies in a survey we did for cloud and hosting provider True. Digital agencies also claim that lack of knowledge (76%) and an obsolete IT infrastructure (55%) are holding back digital transformation.
IT departments are also faced with digital disruption. For one, because they need to support business departments in their transformational activities. But also because the IT department itself is challenged by IT consumerization, shadow IT and the plethora of public enterprise cloud services that business executives are now capable of ordering with the swipe of a credit card. Security software vendor Skyhigh, in its quarterly cloud adoption & risk reports, finds that the average European organization is now using 987 cloud services of which the most popular category is collaboration with 226 cloud services (Q2 2015 results). Clearly there is a demand within European enterprises for public cloud services.
But unchecked cloud usage also exposes organisations to risk. IT departments typically follow one of several strategies when dealing with public cloud usage: ignore cloud usage, block cloud usage, create private cloud apps, or facilitate cloud usage. Corporations that ignore public cloud usage do so at their own peril. We believe enterprises should follow a combination of block, innovate and facilitate cloud usage. Block high risk applications, build applications that cannot be found in the public cloud and facilitate the usage of public cloud apps that serve a clear need that public cloud services can supply quicker and with more elasticity than the IT department. A digitally transformed IT department serves as a tour guide and broker of IT services rather than a tour operator or builder of applications.
Below you will find the slides from the presentation. The slides are embedded in this post but can also be downloaded on slideshare.
