All of us stand witness to the accelerated pace of change in the age that is being touted as the fourth industrial revolution. Digital transformation is the mainstay of all conversations and technological expertise is being unleashed across industries and geographies to maximize impact, right from enhancing competitive edge to improving efficiency and agility, to elevating customer experience.

The exponential growth of connected devices, advent of social, mobile, analytics and cloud (SMAC), BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) pose significant challenges and opportunities for businesses globally.

The Internet, the Cloud and mobility have changed the way we approach work and the way CTOs approach their IT challenges. The evolution of data storage technologies allows the end user to store unlimited data in an always available, highly durable and fully secure environment with enterprise-grade system management. We live in a world that is seeing an avalanche of data every single day. The total amount of data in the world was 4.4 zettabytes in 2013. That is set to rise steeply to 44 zettabytes by 2020. This data needs to be computed and stored and converged storage is going to be critical to operational excellence.

The enterprise cloud computing market is rapidly evolving to meet every single variable in the customer wish-list. Today, enterprises work across several layers of private, public and hybrid cloud options. According to IDC FutureScape predictions, more than 80 percent of enterprise IT organisations will commit to hybrid cloud architectures by 2017. The global cloud storage business sector has been projected by MarketsandMarkets, to grow from $23.76 billion in 2016 to $74.94 billion by 2021, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 25.8 percent during the forecast period.

What does the Cloud-Powered Customer Experience demand?

It’s one thing knowing that the latest frontiers in customer experience are going to be demanding on your business and on your cloud deployment. It’s quite another matter working out how to master them.

There are many approaches that you can adopt, but success in each of these comes down to three factors.

Flexibility - You need to make sure that your infrastructure is flexible enough to allow you to make changes when you need to.

Reliability - Your infrastructure has to run smoothly, no matter what. In addition, its delivery of services must be predictable. It’s the only way to maintain SLAs that everyone – external customers and internal colleagues – will buy into.

Scalability - With enhanced customer experience, more and more customers (in principle, at least) will begin to spread the good word about your business. This will mean more customers buying from you, more customer engagement, and your shoulders carrying more expectations. Not surprisingly, you’ll need your solution to be highly scalable.

Clearly, if you’re to put your business in the cloud, you’ll need to have the right tools and the right network and more importantly the right partner to enable it.