October 22, 2024
Cloud computing is transforming how Australia’s businesses operate, offering greater flexibility, scalability and cost-effectiveness compared to on-premise systems.
With 70% of businesses using cloud platforms to accelerate their business initiatives, Gartner is predicting that public cloud spending will reach A$23.2bn in Australia this year, up 19.3% from 2023.
Cloud isn’t just another IT tool – it has the potential to be transformative across all industries, including finance and superannuation. However, as highlighted in our earlier blogs, understanding your current situation and laying solid foundations is essential before embarking on a digital transformation.
In this third blog of the series, we’ll explore how finance organisations and superannuation funds can optimise and scale the cloud to unlock greater business value.
Cloud is a top focus for CIOs, with 79% listing it as their second-largest tech funding priority after cybersecurity. Despite its advantages, we regularly hear from our clients that their cloud costs are continuing to rise without returning the expected business value. Why? Because simply lifting and shifting everything to the cloud without a strategy leads to inefficiencies.
In the early stages of cloud adoption, many companies used it for one or two limited purposes without giving too much thought to the overall architecture or configuration. But as businesses grow and add on more cloud applications, a lack of a cohesive strategy can lead to inefficiencies and spiralling costs.
As we found in the first blog, conducting a comprehensive cloud health check is key to understanding your current environment and defining an effective strategy. Cloud computing isn’t just about moving away from on-prem systems—it’s about preparing the groundwork to enable future innovations and meet business goals.
Think of it this way – if you want a supercar designed for speed you might spend a lot of time and resources crafting the body to maximise its aerodynamic qualities. But if you then install a tiny, low-powered engine, you won’t get the speed and acceleration you expect from a supercar. You’ll have wasted all that money and effort.
It’s the same with cloud computing. For businesses wanting to perform complex tasks in the cloud or use cutting-edge AI technologies, cloud infrastructure optimisation is critical. Without the right cloud foundations, these innovations won’t deliver their full potential and could end up being costly.
Tools like automation, consistent monitoring, and regular testing within Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines are essential cloud optimisation steps for speeding up deployment times and creating more reliable systems.
Maximising the unique functionality of the cloud to simplify repeatable tasks across an organisation can also make a huge difference. By establishing digital platforms with paved roads—standardised processes that ensure consistent deployment and development across teams—organisations can further improve cloud value, accelerate time to market, and reduce costs.
Governance and security regulations can also be implemented within these paved roads, helping organisations maintain compliance and security best practices and limit the blast radius of security incidents. In contrast to bespoke on-prem systems, where incidents could have catastrophic consequences, the cloud makes it easier to separate and contain services, reducing the overall impact on business operations, costs and reputational damage.
Within the highly regulated and increasingly competitive landscapes of finance and superannuation, an optimised cloud enables faster innovation, better compliance and improved service reliability.
For example, Spirit Super’s move to the cloud enabled it to grow and scale its platform with the business while remaining adaptable to regulatory changes. By optimising its cloud processes from the outset, we helped Spirit Super increase its team capacity for new initiatives from 5% to 66%, eliminate downtime and create reliable cloud-native services in just three months. It’s provided the catalyst for Spirit Super’s cloud platform development and is enabling it to deliver greater value for its members.
Cloud has endless transformation potential but to fully unlock its business value, organisations need a clear strategy for optimisation – whether that means reducing cloud costs, focusing on security and compliance or speeding up product development.
For superannuation funds looking to differentiate themselves in a highly competitive market through new innovation and technology, optimising the cloud is vital step on this journey.
Interested in finding out how to optimise and scale your cloud capabilities? Contact us today or join us at the ASFA Conference in Sydney from November 19-21, 2024, where we’ll be demoing our AI-enabled superannuation complaints management concept and exploring cloud optimisation approaches.
All business models have their pros and cons. But, when you consider the type of problems we help our clients to solve at Equal Experts, it’s worth thinking about the level of experience and the best consultancy approach to solve them.
If you’d like to find out more about working with us – get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.
