Cloud computing’s next phase in business transformation
In the first phases of cloud adoption, played out over the last five to ten years, IT departments enjoyed cheaper computing and storage capabilities and better agility. These phases are still significant in their own right, but critically they have laid the foundations for cloud’s next phase as a fundamental enabler of higher value services, such as artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain and the internet of things. Organisations are under pressure to transform and innovate at the same pace of industry disruption. To achieve this, businesses need the flexibility and freedom to exploit services from multiple clouds, and to be equipped to deliver competitive, innovative and elastic apps which they can easily integrate across the business. High street bank RBS, for example, developed an artificially intelligent chatbot to reduce the load on live agents and soon found that computing-intensive workloads such as AI are best suited to the public cloud. Its use of cloud and cognitive tec