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                            <p><a data-analytics-id="inline-link" href="https://www.techradar.com/best/best-cloud-computing-services">Cloud</a> adoption is a crucial business strategy to achieve success and unlock value in today's digital landscape. As per a recent survey, 95 percent of European companies claim to capture value from the cloud. However, what really needs to be considered is whether the value realized is merely from improvements to IT and resultant cost savings, or whether it is based on higher-value cloud use cases that leverage new age technologies.</p><p>The research also indicates that companies that have effectively integrated gen <a data-analytics-id="inline-link" href="https://www.techradar.com/best/best-ai-tools">AI</a> (generative AI) in their transformations, could achieve up to seven times the ROI (Return on Investment) of their peers for each migrated business domain. Therefore, successful cloud adoption must extend beyond technology and should involve accomplishing specific business objectives.</p>

Metrics for a robust cloud strategy

A well-planned cloud strategy is one that emphasizes elements like strategic management, cost optimization, business agility, resilience, business domain adoption and foundational capabilities.

Strategic management involves aligning cloud adoption with business goals and establishing governance frameworks, where technical decisions are directly tied to business outcomes. The next metric of cost optimization is realized by shifting from capital to operational expenses, ensuring scalable resource allocation, and faster solution delivery. It involves monitoring metrics like cost per usage to maximize returns on cloud investments.

This ideally leads to decreased IT expenses and frees up resources for strategic endeavors. The third metric of business agility assesses the organization's adaptability to dynamic market changes. Cloud services can play a pivotal role in accelerating time-to-market for new product showcases, thereby fostering innovation. Performance and scalability of cloud infrastructures can be evaluated through application uptime and the ability to scale on demand, towards seamless operations and enhanced customer experiences.

The next component of a comprehensive cloud strategy is resilience, which essentially refers to the ability of the cloud infrastructure to bounce back from setbacks seamlessly. In the new era of cloud resiliency, security is prioritized from the outset, through continuous operations and formidable security measures against cyber threats. This includes implementing robust access controls, data encryption, threat detection measures and tracking security incidents through audits to uphold data security and compliance.

Building resilience also involves modernizing IT infrastructure, automating infrastructure management, and implementing modern networking solutions. Technologies that enable flexible workloads and optimize resource utilization can significantly enhance operational efficiency. Automation and infrastructure modernization further streamlines operations and unlocks new possibilities for innovation and growth.

Business domain adoption, another element of an effective cloud strategy, focuses on integrating cloud technologies to drive innovation and enhance customer experiences. Cloud adoption drives revenue growth through new offerings, elevates customer satisfaction via quicker interactions, and empowers the workforce with superior collaboration tools. Lastly, focus must be laid on building foundational capabilities by developing technical skills, adopting agile methodologies, and modernizing IT infrastructure to support seamless integration with cloud services.

Skill building also needs to be considered for successful cloud adoption. Skills such as automating infrastructure configurations and managing APIs can be developed as the cloud environment matures. DevOps principles and automated deployments can nurture collaboration, facilitated by continuous integration and delivery pipelines. By prioritizing these metrics, organizations can gain a strategic edge and foster long-term success.

Challenges to realizing cloud value

Transitioning to a cloud-based operation involves a dual-pronged strategy. While cost optimization, requires right-sizing resources, leveraging discounted instances, and implementing auto-scaling based on demand, accurately forecasting demand and navigating complex cloud pricing structures can be difficult. Likewise, while scalability is enabled by containerization, serverless computing, and infrastructure automation, managing complex applications, ensuring security during scaling, and avoiding vendor lock-in present additional challenges. Therefore, organizations must continuously monitor and adapt their strategies while addressing these challenges.

Developing a cloud governance framework

An effective cloud strategy aligns business goals through a strong governance framework that prioritizes security, compliance, and cost optimization, while being flexible to accommodate growth. Piloting non-critical applications can help refine this strategy before larger migrations. Cloud optimization is an iterative journey, requiring ongoing refinement to sustain benefits.

Companies must first assess their maturity model to identify areas for improvement. This includes optimizing their cloud mix by exploring different cloud providers or cost structures, providing regular policy updates for compliance, cultivating a continuous improvement culture, proactively addressing challenges, and having active leadership involvement in the cloud vision for stakeholder buy-in.

Today, cloud technology has transformed the way businesses provide customer services, offering them a personalized, scalable, real-time interaction experience. Companies can offer their customers seamless experiences across multiple channels, ensuring the same level of service whether their customers interact online, through mobile apps, or in-store. Cloud-based data analytics helps businesses gain valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences, allowing them to provide proactive support, and fostering long-term loyalty.

Conclusion

The merits of cloud computing are well established and European companies have shifted focus on deriving business value such as increased operational efficiency, faster time-to-market for products and services, enhanced customer satisfaction, and improved bottom-line results. By aligning their business goals and cloud strategies, these companies will realize tangible results to unlock even more business value in future.

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This article was produced as part of TechRadarPro's Expert Insights channel where we feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today. The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/news/submit-your-story-to-techradar-pro

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Source: Strategies for measuring success and unlocking business value in cloud adoption

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                            <p>In today's fast-paced digital landscape, <a data-analytics-id="inline-link" href="https://www.techradar.com/best/best-cloud-computing-services">cloud</a> applications serve as powerful enablers, providing businesses with the agility to rapidly deploy new services and updates. They empower businesses to innovate and provide more resilience than traditional IT infrastructure – enabling organizations to scale resources dynamically, such as handling traffic spikes at key moments.</p><p>None of this is new information – in fact, cloud migration has been on the agenda for a decade now - with businesses grappling on-premises, multi- or hybrid- cloud infrastructure decisions. Key ambitions have been focused on maximizing cost-effectiveness, improving resilience and elevating <a data-analytics-id="inline-link" href="https://www.techradar.com/best/cx-tools">customer experiences</a>.</p><p>On a macro level, many UK businesses feel good progress has been made, with 61% of executives believing the computing infrastructure in the UK is a strength, according to new Accenture research. Yet, businesses are still facing major challenges, in particular with their highly complex, monolithic core solutions, and these are getting ever more urgent as organizations look to liberate their huge wealth of data and apply <a data-analytics-id="inline-link" href="https://www.techradar.com/best/best-ai-tools">AI</a>.</p>

The impact of AI on cloud adoption

So much has been said on the opportunity of gen AI – a technology that could double the UK’s economic growth during the next 15 years. Not only in its personal productivity promise, but gen AI is already showing potential to reinvent processes across the entire value chain.

But applying AI into business processes has also introduced new challenges, including diverting attention away from ensuring their core foundations have the agility to keep up with AI’s advances in the first place. While companies can be lured by the short-term productivity boost of sporadic AI solutions, businesses need to keep focused on the core – not just the cool – and build their infrastructure around an AI strategy. A short-term view of AI risks complicating cloud costs and leads to the proliferation of AI products within the enterprise.

The development of technologies such as AI has also highlighted businesses are grappling with varying digital infrastructure capabilities, which can affect how an organization harnesses the potential of these new and innovative technologies. In fact, our research found when asked about their ability to realize the full potential from generative AI, one in five (19%) businesses felt their tech stack fell below cloud computing requirements and 16% felt they were below the cybersecurity requirements. And how to train such models? Clean, accurate data from the start helps companies avoid unwieldy and costly errors that can hold back the power of their AI investments.

Going back to basics then. A strong digital core allows enterprises to integrate key components and infrastructure like cloud, data, AI, and security easily, enabling dynamic operations, quick responses to market demands and the ability to drive reinvention.

Security as a foundational element

Organizations must prepare for constant flux and change. Geopolitical instability, environmental challenges, shifting consumer preferences, and spiraling supply chains continue to evolve the risk landscape. Meanwhile innovation, including AI, offers immense opportunities, but can also expand the attack surface and provide cybercriminals with powerful weaponry.

It’s therefore particularly worrying that against this backdrop, only half of organizations (53%) report to be completely prepared to defend against emerging threats, including deepfakes and generative AI powered malware, according to Accenture’s Pulse of Change research. Cloud providers offer advanced features like automated threat detection and AI-driven responses, helping businesses quickly identify and address cyber threats. These tools, along with robust encryption, access controls, and reliable disaster recovery solutions, provide critical protection against evolving risks.

Training for resilience

As cyberattacks become more sophisticated, adopting these security measures is a key step in ensuring operational resilience and safeguarding business operations. However, this should no longer solely be the responsibility of a CISO but instead should sit at the backbone of any business. The human element remains crucially important.

Employees are the first line of defense, and often the chink in the armor, so their ability to identify and report suspicious activity makes all the difference. However, effective training requires more than a one-size-fits-all approach. Simulations that replicate phishing attempts, for example, are invaluable in helping employees recognize and react to potential scams.

Driving growth

According to a recent Accenture study, companies with a strong digital core report faster growth and higher profitability compared to their peers. Such posture also helps enterprises to gain a fast or first-mover advantage and stay ahead of the competition. As businesses generate more data, the need for agile digital infrastructure that can analyze and leverage this are only becoming more critical.

Integrating robust security measures into the digital core is also not just a necessity but offers a strategic advantage. It ultimately helps to prevent threats, protect value and build a trusted ecosystem with partners and suppliers, in which collective growth can be fostered. Of course, having a customized solution to the enterprise or industry is also important – this is not a one size fits all approach. Yet, the common theme is that as businesses navigate the complexities of the modern technological landscape, those that prioritize a strong, secure digital core and are focused on smooth integration, will be better positioned to thrive.

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This article was produced as part of TechRadarPro's Expert Insights channel where we feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today. The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/news/submit-your-story-to-techradar-pro

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Source: The digital bedrock of a business holds the key to innovation with intelligence

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• Windows 10 adoption has dropped to nearly one in two devices (54.2%)
• Windows 11 could even finally overtake in the coming months
• AI PCs are also boosting sales, report claims

Windows 11 is finally starting to pick up some real momentum as the flagship OS continues on its long journey to overtake Windows 10 – a milestone that could happen within the next few months.

A significant uptick in the first few months of 2025 means that Windows 11 adoption now stands at 42.7% (as of March 2025), with Windows 10 installs dropping to 54.2% (via Statcounter)

If recent trends continue, it’s possible that Windows 10 adoption could fall below 50% next month – Windows 11 overtaking Windows 10 might not be that far behind, either.

Windows 11 set to overtake Windows 10?

The sudden growth is largely due to the looming Windows 10 end of support, which arrived in October 2024, leading to widespread enterprise upgrades to avoid disruption.

Exploring 2024 as a whole, industry analysts from Canalys noted the use of aggressive holiday discounts to get consumers to spend more after a fairly stagnant year. The twelve-month period saw a mediocre 3.9% increase in PC shipments globally, but the firm remained optimistic for the year ahead.

“The PC market is set for accelerating growth, primarily driven by commercial demand as businesses prepare for the end of Windows 10,” noted Principal Analyst Ishan Dutt.

Enterprises are in the midst of refreshing hardware in order to make more systems compatible with Windows 11, though user interest has been fairly low with the OS featuring few stand-out apps and must-haves.

Since the launch of Windows 11, Microsoft has been busy shoehorning endless AI features into desktops and laptops across the globe in the hope that consumers and businesses might be more keen to upgrade, not to miss out, hence the emergence of a new category of PC – the Copilot PC.

AI-capable PCs accounted for nearly one in four (23%) of all PCs in the final three months of 2024; Canalys anticipates this figure to stand at 35% for 2025.

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Source: Windows 11 adoption grows as businesses finally get around to upgrading their devices

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• DOGE reportedly planning a “mega API” to be created in a hackathon
• The API will streamline tax data sharing for the IRS
• Trump’s executive order aims to stop waste, fraud and abuse

Elon Musk’s brainchild government agency, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), is reportedly planning a ‘hackathon’ to build a “mega API” for accessing IRS data in a major streamlining move.

According to Wired, the goal is to centralize IRS data into a single-cloud hosting platform that could become the “read center of all IRS systems,” and unnamed sources cited by Wired have already named one potential partner.

“Palantir… has been brought up consistently by DOGE representatives as a possible candidate,” Wired’s sources say.

Musk wants to make an IRS “mega API”

Palantir Technologies, which currently has a market cap of $173.5 billion, notably counts Peter Thiel among its co-founders – a known associate of Musk.

The firm’s main clients include US government agencies, but some private sector firms are also customers.

“Dozens” of IRS engineers are being invited to a Washington DC hackathon event to collaborate on the API, and it’s believed that the API has a short timeline of just 30 days – something that insiders believe is both unrealistic and potentially harmful.

With the API, DOGE hopes to collate core sensitive data like names, addresses, SSNs, tax returns and employment details.

It could considerably streamline inter-departmental data sharing, however critics argue that it could present a major security risk, describing it as “an open door controlled by Musk for all American's most sensitive information with none of the rules that normally secure that data.”

On March 20, 2025, Trump signed an executive order to banish information silos, with the aim of “stopping waste, fraud and abuse.” The order appeared to focus on the IRS, declaring an interest in “eliminating bureaucratic duplication and inefficiency while enhancing the Government’s ability to detect overpayments and fraud.”

The White House has not yet shared any plans for the rumored hackathon.

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Source: DOGE planning “hackathon” to build a “mega API” for accessing all IRS and taxpayer data