Surviving to thriving: The digital transformation of SMEs

SME technology adoption

As a result of the pandemic, SMEs are investing increasingly more time and money in their digital transformation efforts. While some implemented digital capabilities for the first time as a matter of survival, others accelerated their journey to cloud adoption in order to remain nimble in light of ongoing disruption.

As businesses look to adjust to the rapidly changing environment, Tech Amigos Director -Architecture Roddy Herries reveals these circumstances can offer small and mid-size companies opportunities to win business – if they can find the right strategy for it.

“Larger businesses typically benefit by having more time and resources to invest in their digital transformation projects. Over time, these businesses gain more experience, they develop greater maturity in understanding their requirements and their teams grow more competent in delivering and operating cloud-native solutions and microservice architectures.

“SMBs need to become smarter and more realistic concerning digital adoption by following a well-trodden path where possible, implementing proven and tested patterns. The transformation journey should be focussed and based on well-defined objectives, but also must be adaptable to the changing priorities that may arise during the course of the initiative”.

Cloud solutions provide significant benefits to companies of all sizes, however, a recent study conducted by IBM highlights that less than 10 per cent of organisations believe their existing IT infrastructure is fully prepared to address the proliferation of cloud computing, mobile devices, social media, and data analytics.

Herries also highlights – “The decision to invest in cloud as part of your digital transformation should be driven by business needs and challenges at hand, although it seems increasingly hard for businesses to stay competitive without embracing cloud technologies. In almost all cases, the adoption of cloud technology enables your digital transformation to move at a faster pace with minimal capital expenditure compared to traditional on-premises strategies.

“In addition, cloud adoption together with great automation offers operational efficiencies and reduction of OPEX costs, freeing up cash for investment in activities that matter to the business and its customers. Digital transformation is not optional anymore for SMEs to remain competitive and cloud adoption is the cornerstone for any such transformation.

“IT infrastructure only becomes agile with automation. Automation unlocks many benefits and is a key investment that will repay you multiple times over through improved security, reduced time-to-market of new features, improved quality, enablement of innovation and reduced operational cost savings. An agile infrastructure setup with automation supports the “fail-fast, fail-often” approach to iterative experimentation and that’s fuel to the fire of continuously delivering new, high-quality software to your customers”.

Roddy concluded: “Digital transformation projects require a mosaic of skills. Getting the right skills and high-level talent together to deliver success is hard for all organisations, regardless of size. Tech Amigos can lead or augment your digital transformation project and we can help you up-skill and train your own team.

“SMBs can benefit from our collaborative approach as it allows us to identify and add value where it is most needed by the client. We offer reliable and secure patterns for CI/CD tooling and deploying to cloud environments, enabling faster delivery of SMBs digital transformation projects.”