EY: How the cloud transforms critical sectors of the economy

The benefits, strategies, but also the challenges of the transition to the cloud for critical sectors of economic activity, were the subject of a series of webcasts organized by EY Greece with the support of Microsoft.

Specifically, an event on Wednesday, December 15 focused on the financial sector and the insurance sector, while on Thursday, December 16, the webcast focused on the oil and gas sectors, and advanced manufacturing. The online events were attended by senior executives of Greek and multinational companies operating in the respective sectors.

The two webcasts were prefaced by Mr. Panagiotis Papagiannakopoulos, Partner in the Consulting Services Department of EY Greece and responsible for EY’s relationship with Microsoft Greece, who noted that the pandemic accelerated investment and the adoption of the cloud, with most companies worldwide to adopt multi-cloud strategies.
According to the findings of EY research on the adoption of the cloud in the banking and insurance industry, Mr. Papagiannakopoulos stressed that the transition to the public cloud is expected to transform banks and insurance providers, listing the top goals, challenges, risks and means each branch. To achieve this transition, among other things, banks will have to invest in specially trained human resources, while insurance companies will have to reconsider their strategy to take advantage of native cloud services.

Respectively, for the oil and gas and advanced manufacturing sectors, he noted that companies strive to achieve sustainable performance through traditional approaches to industrial excellence, emphasizing that resilience is achieved through digital capital enhancement and touch transitions to zero. with the help of technology and data. In this context, he briefly presented EY Smart Factory, a solution for the industry based on the cloud platform Microsoft Azure, which enhances the capabilities of human resources and reduces low value-added processes, accelerating the transition to a zero trust model.

During the webcasts, cloud adoption issues were addressed, such as the cloud operating model, the business parameters of the business, the transition to Azure, the organization-level transformation, and the cloud adoption framework.

Specifically, during the first section, Mr. George Kleanis, Senior Manager, in the Consulting Services Department of EV Greece, focused on the objectives, design and implementation of a sustainable operating model for the smooth transition to the Cloud (Cloud Operating Model – COM), while He also went on to analyze the financial aspects of the transition to the cloud, both in terms of investment and business benefits. More specifically, both operating expenses (OPEX) and capital expenditures (CAPEX) were analyzed, as well as the pillar of sustainable development achieved by organizations and businesses from the transition to the cloud, thus depositing their positive environmental footprint.

In issues related to the adoption of the cloud in the second section, Messrs. Vangelis Kappas and Panos Pataridis, Microsoft Azure Solution Specialists. The speakers presented the journey of the transition to the Azure platform and the tools that companies have at their disposal to achieve this, while they also referred to the business value assessment (BVA) opportunities offered by Azure. In addition, they analyzed Microsoft’s framework for the adoption of the Cloud in Azure, the Landing Zones / Design Areas, and the enterprise-scale architectural approach for an organization-wide transformation.

In the third and last section, Messrs. Fotis Sofronis, Senior Manager and Efthymios Grapsas, Manager in the Consulting Services Department of EY Greece, focused on the various extensions of cloud management, such as the governance model, the criticality of monitoring and controlling the transition costs during the adoption of a cloud model, the policies and cloud control and management processes during the transition phase, ensuring a level of security reporting (Security Baseline) and cloud identity and rights management, resource consistency, DevOps / DevSecOps), and cloud expansion and application, and the potential risks involved. In closing, the speakers shared useful information and tips from their experience in similar projects of large organizations abroad.

The two online events ended with a panel discussion between Messrs. Papagiannakopoulou, Grapsa and Kappa, who answered questions from the audience.

You can watch on demand the webcast for the financial industry and the insurance industry, here. For the webcast on the oil and gas and advanced manufacturing industries, press here.