Companies have had only mixed results in their decades-long quest to make better decisions by harnessing enterprise data. But as a new generation of technologies make it easier than ever to unlock the value of business information, change is coming. We’ve already reaped gains at Hitachi Vantara, where I run a global IT team that supports 11,000 employees and helps more than 10,000 customers rapidly scale digital businesses.

I’m starting to hear questions like: “What comes next?” “Do things go back to the way they were?” “Are some of the changes wrought by the pandemic here to stay?” I think we all know part of the answer: there is no going (all the way) back. In the analog world, sure, we need some things to revert to bounce back. We need to revitalize retail, tourism and hospitality to get our economies moving again.

Automation will fail to achieve most of its potential if treated as a specialty, single-function tool applied only to accelerate narrow parts of business processes. In most industries, financial services included, automation done properly is a journey that delivers a steady stream of benefits resulting from building a broader and increasingly powerful multilayered stack of automated processes and analytics.

When digital disruption first hit the finance and investment markets, it seemed to signal the death knell for the traditional banks and financial institutions. For a time, it looked as though the best-known brands were doomed to become utilities: only good for basic financial transactions, weighed down by legacy processes and technologies, and viewed as little more than digital dinosaurs.

Large-scale, sophisticated attacks like the SolarWinds cyber intrusion and the Microsoft Exchange Server hack are disturbing, to say the least. These are more than just bad headlines; they reflect fundamental, systemic problems with the security postures in most enterprises. One underreported issue is the continued adherence of organizations to principles that maintain strong perimeter controls to prevent things outside from coming in.

It seems like only yesterday that the cloud was considered the destination. For technology decision-makers, choices boiled down to: “Do I want this thing in my data center, or would it be better, cheaper and faster in the cloud?” The cloud was the place to be.

Last month, we were proud to launch our Hitachi Kubernetes Service, a true storage-as-a-service (SaaS) offering to improve the performance and management of multiple Kubernetes environments. By enabling users to manage their clusters simply and securely across any major cloud provider and on premises, Kubernetes can play an instrumental role in businesses’ modernization efforts. It’s for this reason that we are always working to get it on the radar of our existing clients.

2021 is set to be the year of hybrid cloud. In fact, Forbes has even listed it as one of the top 10 digital transformation trends of the year, declaring it the “winning enterprise architecture.” A multiple cloud approach does provide greater choice and greater flexibility – two major benefits at a time when agility and adaptability have never been more important. But this approach comes with greater operational complexity.

The past 10 months have accelerated the race to cloud. That’s all the more reason to pause and check that you’re moving in the right direction. Cloud migration these days is something of a no-brainer. For most businesses, it’s no longer a question of whether to migrate to cloud. The real issues are around the how, when, what, where and even the why of cloud.