Does your organisation have a multi-cloud strategy?

Multi-cloud has become the norm for many Australian businesses, with Oracle reporting in February 2023 that 93% of Australian enterprises used multiple cloud environments. Many organisations use a multi-cloud strategy to back up data and reduce downtime. In this blog, I’ll focus on a slightly different angle: adopting a multi-cloud strategy to avoid vendor lock-in and use best-of-breed solutions. 

Adopting a multi-cloud strategy enables your company to build a composable infrastructure by using the best features of different cloud providers. A composable enterprise uses modular components to build its tech stack, rather than use a few monolithic applications. It’s an approach that, when done properly, fosters flexible operations and optimises costs.

As of March 2023, the CSIRO found that 68% of Australian businesses had adopted AI and 23% planned to implement it within 12 months. In December last year, the Australian Government announced a $17 million initiative to help SMEs adopt artificial intelligence (AI). The initiative aims to kickstart Australian SMEs towards leveraging AI's benefits and competitive advantages.

However, adopting AI requires more than just financial backing. The Government's initiative acknowledges this by emphasising that it will support SMEs in adopting AI responsibly and efficiently.

Before 'switching on' AI in your business, you need a clear AI business strategy that aligns adoption with the business goals. Critical to this strategy is a strong focus on data integration. Why? Because AI needs comprehensive and reliable information for it to produce reliable results. (Remember the old saying, ‘Garbage in, garbage out’). The best way to ensure that is to automate data flow between systems and into the AI service. Effectively using AI depends on access to well-organised, clean business information to produce reliable insights. Without consistent data sources, your organisation will struggle to get the results you were hoping for in your AI experimentation.

With any modern business, there’s an expectation that customers can interact with your brand across multiple touchpoints (which includes devices and platforms). The cross-platform personalised experience has moved from a ‘nice to have’ to a minimum standard. Therefore, all those touchpoints within your business need to have that customer data readily available. But this is often not the case.

Adopting a new customer experience (CX) platform is an opportunity to enhance these customer interactions. But its real potential goes beyond the capabilities of the platform itself. The true value lies in its ability to connect all your existing customer touchpoints and enhance them. Too often, companies will adopt a new CX platform without first considering how it will fit within the current ecosystem, inadvertently creating more work for already busy teams as they work with disconnected platforms.

In this blog, I’ll suggest some key consideration points when adopting a new CX platform and common challenges to avoid.