Businesses are at a pivotal moment in time. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that global GDP shrank by 4.4% in 2020, and contraction in the most advanced economies is estimated to be 5.8%. Today, however, vaccine availability and distribution brings us the brightest glimmer of hope yet that slowing the devastation of the virus may be a reality. More effectively addressing the health crisis also means economic recovery is becoming a stronger possibility – if businesses can lean into change and embrace new ways of working.

To enable this recovery, organisations across every industry are accelerating their shift to digital solutions. Turning to cloud technology promises to solve their most challenging problems and enable opportunities amidst changing customer demands and regulatory frameworks. In fact, McKinsey estimates the pandemic has fueled a three- to four-year acceleration of companies adopting digital technologies to support their customer and supply chain interactions. The most innovative companies need to rethink how employees collaborate and how they can digitise customer experiences.

Here are three key ways in which companies can use technology to their advantage and fuel their own recovery.

Businesses need to lower their costs and replatform for the future
Macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainties create unknowns for every business. As a result, CEOs and CFOs are naturally seeking to optimise areas of their organisations.

Buying, maintaining and upgrading the technology infrastructure needed to run a business is not only difficult, but increasingly it is prohibitively expensive. Fixed IT systems require users to accurately predict their future needs, which now seem out-of-touch with our ever-changing business landscape. By contrast, a cloud server ensures that you only invest in the right amount, enabling users to flexibly adjust their consumption to meet fluctuating demands. This allows businesses to reinvest the remaining capital in creating customer experiences that will drive value creation. Gartner estimates that infrastructure-as-a-service is expected to grow 27.6% in 2021, precisely because of these cost savings and operational efficiencies – two of the greatest benefits of moving to the cloud.

Additionally, companies are realising the potential of a multicloud strategy. This set-up allows businesses to achieve an open, secure and agile infrastructure that can run in any environment, on any cloud. To grow and innovate within a company may mean moving entire on-premise IT infrastructure to the cloud, to transform digital operations.

Every business needs a digital front door
The remote nature of our lives—which is a permanent shift—is compelling businesses to use data and analytics to understand their customers better, overall enriching the customer experience.

Lockdowns have accelerated customer preferences for digital alternatives. Face-to-face customer service – a physical front door- is no longer enough to sustain a growing business. Today, customers also demand a ‘digital entrance’, and it’s transcending virtually every industry. In retail, companies are using AI and machine learning to deliver a better, more accurate online experience. Healthcare providers need secure, scalable platforms that support digital patient visits known as telemedicine.

Digital front doors are also changing the way governments work, like leveraging the cloud to distribute unemployment insurance online. With digitisation comes the opportunity for businesses to use data and analytics to make smarter decisions and get closer to their customers by creating more useful and productive experiences. By investing in innovative digital front doors now, companies will remain agile throughout the pandemic, whilst pivoting with changing customer expectations. Companies should celebrate the ease of digital experiences, which are personalisable and in no way mean a sacrifice on quality.

Companies need to embrace new ways of working
The future of work—and, for that matter, the definition of “workplace” itself—has transformed. While the pandemic as we know it will one day subside, our new way of working is here to stay, and it’s heightened the need to rethink how people get things done. We see the need for a new hybrid work environment, where companies and employees can use a digital workspace that allows them to collaborate on a flexible, cloud-native platform to generate new ideas and connect with each other. A successful transition into this new era of work is contingent on how successfully companies keep their people engaged, productive, and connected while reevaluating existing communication and collaboration tools.

No one can predict what the coming years will bring, but companies can control how they respond to uncertainty by investing in agile infrastructure that keeps people and connection at the heart of their operations. At this inflection point in the story of work, the ways in which each company responds to the challenges and opportunities it brings will define their relevance in the future. Those who lean into change, no matter how uncomfortable, and embrace the opportunity to fundamentally transform, will be stronger than before.

A public cloud is a platform that uses the standard cloud computing model to make resources, such as virtual machines, applications, or storage, available to remote users. Public cloud services may be free or offered through several subscriptions or on-demand pricing schemes, including a pay-per-usage model.

Public cloud is an alternative application development approach to traditional on-premises IT architectures. In the basic public cloud computing model, third party hosts scalable, on-demand IT resources and provides them to users over a network connection, either the public internet or a dedicated network.

A low-code development platform is an app that provides the Graphical User Interface for Programming and develops the code at a fast rate, and reduces the traditional programming efforts. Therefore, many public clouds and big tech companies use low-code and no-code platforms to build internal workflow applications and rapidly develop customer-facing experience. Low-code and no-code platforms provide an alternative option when the business requirements matched the platform’s capabilities.

Many low-code platforms have been available in the market for more than a decade. And some of these support tens of thousands of business applications. Over time such platforms have enhanced capabilities, developer experience, hosting options, enterprise security, application integrations, and other competencies that allow rapid development and easy maintenance of the functionally rich application.

Why Public Clouds and Big Tech Target Low-code Platforms
There are two reasons why public clouds and big tech companies target low-code platforms.

First, public clouds companies target development and engineering teams that want to code apps, automate Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment pipelines, and instantiate infrastructure as code—developing products for citizen developers and others who wish to build them with low-code requires different experiences, tools, and functionality.

Second, stand-alone-low-code platforms have evolved through multiple computing paradigms. Some go back to client-server days. Newcomers would offer matching capabilities and the strategies and motivations to remain relevant.

In some cases, the low-code platforms are woefully behind stand-alone platforms. On the other hand, they demonstrate how low-code can enable machine learning, chatbots, voice interfaces, spatial search, and more.

Low-code Development Platforms
monday.com
monday.com offers a low code development platform that helps to digitize processes and workflows. It increases employees’ productivity and engagement, helping with fast building functionality as per requirements.

The platform helps to automate the workflow without coding. It has interactive boards and custom forms that provide business data in a quick and standardize way. monday.com can be seamlessly incorporated with existing data and tools. It has over 50 prebuilt adapters to integrate it with in-house built systems through an open API.

Visual LANSA
Visual LANSA’s low-code platform stimulates and simplifies enterprise apps while making the development team more productive. It develops apps faster, easier, and at a lower cost than traditional methods. It can write code inside the IDE. It is the only platform that runs on IBMi, Windows, and Web.

Quixy
Quixy is a no-code BPM and Application Development Platform. It can be used by the business of any industry to create complex enterprise-grade apps. Application development will be 10X faster without writing any code. Quixy has dozens of prebuilt solutions for various use cases such as CRM and Project & Task Management.

KiSSFLOW
KiSSFLOW, BPM, and workflow software enables to create custom apps and automate business processes. It delivers more than 45 pre-installed apps to develop business apps. It provides a cloud-based solution that can be used by businesses of any size and from any industry.

The traditional industries are going through digital transformation and job roles have evolved to the extent that as many as 62% professionals feel ‘daunted’ by the rapid pace of changing skills, a LinkedIn report says.

The traditional industries are going through digital transformation and job roles have evolved to the extent that as many as 62% professionals feel ‘daunted’ by the rapid pace of changing skills, a LinkedIn report says. The skills needed to succeed are changing rapidly and demand for talent with rising skills is three-times that of the rest of the talent base, according to LinkedIn’s ‘Future of Skills 2019’ report, released on Thursday. The research was commissioned by LinkedIn and conducted by ACA Research between March 13 and April 15, 2019.

To determine the top rising skills, LinkedIn analysed skills data listed by members on its platform in the last five years and identified those skills that have experienced exponential growth. The report finds some interesting facts like top skills, Thoughts of Indian professionals on growing dependency on technology and changing job segments. Here are some highlights of the report:

1. The LinkedIn study surveyed 4,136 employees and 844 learning and development (L&D) professionals across countries like Australia, India, Japan, and Singapore, noted that 82 per cent Indian professionals feel that the skills needed to succeed are changing rapidly and 62 per cent feel daunted by the pace of change.