By Fred Crehan, Area Vice President, Emerging Markets at Confluent

Digital channels are becoming the primary touchpoint between consumers and businesses. Today, it’s likely prospects will first engage with your brand via your website, and through the course of their customer journey, they’re far more likely to rely on apps, web portals, instant messaging services, or email to avail of services than traditional in-person channels.

For organizations, digital transformation is no longer a buzzword – it’s imperative, as IT is now inextricably tied to every process, every service, and ultimately, every experience. It’s here that issues arise as digital evolution can only be considered successful when the outcomes match ever-increasing customer expectations. Just having an app is no longer sufficient – rather that’s a given. Research by Gartner has found that customer experience drives over two-thirds of customer loyalty, outperforming price and brand combined. it’s no surprise either that The World Economic Forum projects that the value of digital transformation could be as high as $100 trillion over the next decade.

Legacy systems are still a treasure trove of data.

In recent years, traditional data centers with mainframe or aging architectures have been struggling to support modern business, which includes the scale and speed required to meet new customer and regulatory demands. Organizations have found it increasingly difficult to justify the significant CapEx costs associated with the upgrade and maintenance of these legacy environments. The growing regional investments by global hyperscale and widespread acceptance of public cloud has only fuelled these frustrations and Gartner estimates that end-user expenditure on public cloud services in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region will reach US 5.7 billion this year.

While the benefits of public and hybrid cloud models are clear, the one critical thing to remember is that data centers can still manage critical business processes and hold key functionality that has been developed over many years. This allows them to hold data and a lot of it.

A steady modernization pace beats rip and replace.

With the onslaught of digital transformation, many believed the easiest thing to do was to start from scratch when it came to the technology to run the business. It soon became clear though it was too expensive, too complex, and simply just over ambitious. In fact, research from Micro Focus found 45% of enterprises ripping and replacing their application software were dissatisfied with the result.

Instead, enterprises need to utilize what they already have and retain those core elements of their existing infrastructure and look to the route of IT modernization ensuring they can continuously transform the business over a period.

Invest in building data pipelines.

It is clear businesses need a new way to handle data, one that supports collecting a continuous flow of data from across the business, between apps, databases, SaaS layers, and cloud providers. They need something that links modern services and valuable legacy together in real-time without affecting the running of legacy infrastructure.

So, implementing a platform and layer which will allow data to move fluidly will link all data points together in real-time, no matter where they reside in an organization’s IT infrastructure – from the cloud to on-premises environments.