Moving to the cloud continues to be an important part of any organisation’s technology strategy.

For those that have gotten their acts together quickly, or indeed been built from the ground-up for a digital world, the cloud can have a transformative effect on productivity, speed, cost and scale.

In fact, according to Boston Consulting Group, Australia is one of the most advanced public cloud markets in Asia-Pacific (APAC) and has the potential to contribute a sizeable $US108 billion of GDP between 2019 and 2023.

On-premises deployments for most solutions are often lengthy, costly and complex, requiring many IT resource hours and resulting in slow time-to-market.

To help move past this and advance identity solutions, organisations are increasingly adopting multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments to take advantage of the increased flexibility, availability, and scalability.

This openness also eliminates vendor lock-in, contributing to increased competitive advantage.

By offering this range of deployment options, organisations have the ability to scale with ease according to their business demands and not the limitations of their current identity tools.

It will also help to free up valuable IT resources for other important work while accelerating time-to-market for their mission-critical internal and external apps by providing advanced, full-featured, customisable services that enables their digital transformation journey.

The cloud’s the limit

One industry that has experienced significant digital disruption over the past few years is financial services.

Take Open Banking for example, which is part of the Consumer Data Right (CDR), set to kick off formally in July 2020.

The new regime mandates that banks must enable customers to share their data securely with third parties to accelerate digital change, enable new financial services and increase competitiveness across the entire sector.

Open Banking will force banks to make account and payment data available through secure application programming interfaces (APIs), giving consumers greater freedom and control in how they interact with their financial service providers.

It will usher in a new wave of innovation with incumbents and fintechs set to turn to cloud applications to build and deliver new, more personalised banking products and services.

This is where a comprehensive identity platform, built for cloud, can make it easier and faster to address some of the most pressing problems organisations face - from hyper-personalised experiences to frictionless registration and others.

One organisation that has embraced Open Banking and the innovation opportunities on offer is ANZ.

It has been vocal about its ongoing multi-cloud transformation and recently ramped up its Open Banking preparations.

Earlier this year, it ran a three-day innovation challenge which generated 21 new app ideas.

Access to novel applications and services in the cloud is one of the largest drivers for technological change in companies today.

Every executive I talk to is focused on running their business better and is absolutely happy to offload the necessary IT tasks to someone else who is better at it.

“Why build, run, maintain a host of applications when it’s done for me brilliantly by someone else?”

Like all of us, they want to be freed up to do their actual job.

The Consumer Data Right is only one example of how technology is disrupting traditional industries.

And it won’t be the last.

In the midst of all this disruption, organisations will need to embrace cloud-based applications and platforms that are developer friendly to get ahead.

Building identity management into the cloud is the only way to empower your digital enterprise by enabling exceptional digital experiences; not compromising security; and comprehensive functionality at any scale with simple, flexible, and rapid implementations.

David Hope is Senior Vice President at ForgeRock, APAC.