Epam

M: Yes, cloud today brings new opportunities, but that doesn't mean it is easy to implement. Three key challenges consistently emerged during our conversation:

Wrangling complexity. To say modern enterprise computing is complex—with hundreds or thousands of applications, petabytes of data, and security and compliance challenges, to name a few—would be an understatement. Adding to this complexity, not all clouds are created equal: The initial promise of cloud agnosticism, meaning that any service in one cloud has a perfect equivalent in another, has changed.
Measuring and tracking the value of cloud investments. With a portfolio in the cloud that evolves rapidly, it can be hard to quantify the value you're getting from these investments. Knowing the uplift and the extracted savings is essential to guide the ongoing cloud strategy and perhaps accelerate where the return is the greatest.
Attracting and retaining the right talent. Finding and keeping valuable engineering talent with cutting-edge skills is very difficult in an ever-changing technology landscape, but it is imperative to stay competitive and agile.

Miha: Andy, what were the key themes you heard coming out of our conversation?

Andy: First, everybody we spoke to during the session is already in the cloud. They have made significant investments in cloud computing and agreed that the cloud today has evolved significantly since the early days—really just a decade ago. The cloud was initially viewed as a means to cut IT costs by using it as a virtual data center. Now, most view cloud computing as a vehicle by which they can achieve not only cost savings, but also new levels of agility, as well as faster and more secure innovation.

Few industries have seen more dramatic disruption with the advent of the internet and cloud computing than retail and consumer goods: so much so that today's consumers have come to expect every retailer to deliver an omnichannel experience that blends the physical nature of walking through a store with the ease of transacting digitally. Those expectations existed even before COVID-19 utterly shook the retail industry, causing stores to close entirely or open with new restrictions such as curbside pickup, contactless purchases, and reduced hours.