As revolutionary technologies force us to revisit everything we thought we once knew about business, the accompanying wave of digital transformation continues to sweep across the region.

And in its wake, IT is increasingly being driven out of the back office and into the forefront of boardroom strategies.

Awareness of these technologies is growing by the day and enterprises are driving disruptive changes in their marketplaces by leveraging digital competencies to create new business models, products, and services. As a consequence, the IT function is maturing into an instrument of business agility, efficiency, and cost optimisation.

Agility and cost optimisation are the hallmarks of cloud solutions, with public cloud vendors promising customers the ability to deploy complex solutions quickly while paying only for the resources they consume. So it is little surprise that cloud adoption is gathering momentum across the Middle East as businesses look to shift big capital expenditure (capex) outlays to ongoing operating expenditure (opex) budgets.

However, while most enterprise workloads will ultimately migrate to cloud infrastructure, most organisations are likely to embrace a hybrid IT strategy in the near term. That’s because very few organisations have the capability or desire to move their entire technology stack to the public cloud. And, anyway, it simply doesn’t make business sense to do so.

A much better approach is a gradual transition, moving workloads and applications as it makes sense, resulting in a hybrid mix of public cloud services and on-premises solutions; the latter should, by now, be making extensive use of cloud technologies and practices anyway.

The key to future success is to ensure that whatever model is adopted is also flexible enough to continue that transformation as the environment changes. Workloads should be able to move into or out of the cloud with minimal disruption, or indeed take advantage of moving a subset of functions between locations.

One example of this in practice is in extending the capabilities of enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions. Many organisations today use ERP applications to manage their key processes. Regardless of whether these applications are on-premise or in the cloud, organisations can benefit from the ability to add additional capabilities quickly and seamlessly through cloud platforms.

Of course, this is not limited only to ERP applications; similar ecosystems are springing up in other areas such as customer relationship management, infrastructure management, security, and many more. Emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things and machine learning are becoming readily accessible, deployed in and through cloud services, enabling next-generation services to develop without costly and disruptive infrastructure rip-and-replace exercises.

One of the interesting side effects of this transformation is the shift in boardroom dynamics. The CIO is becoming more involved in business strategy, while other C-level executives, particularly the chief financial and marketing officers (CFO and CMO), are becoming more closely involved in technology decision-making.

Across the Middle East, CIOs rate the CFO as one of the top three executives to be involved in the digital transformation process (the other two being the CIO and the CEO), with the CMO following closely behind. There is clear recognition that financial management and business oversight are critical inputs to a digital transformation process that encompasses far more than just technology.

This change also creates an opportunity to bring a serious business risk under control — Shadow IT. This occurs when line-of-business managers, or even employees, initiate IT projects without proper oversight. Cloud services are a particularly common source of Shadow IT, as they can be easily and directly provisioned by end users. Aside from security risks, this can also create an Opex time bomb; Shadow IT costs tend to mount in the background, with little transparency until they are out of control.

There is also the opportunity cost incurred by the lack of coordination and integration between isolated projects, or lost productivity when a side project is abandoned. The digital transformation process allows the IT department to evolve from a strict gatekeeper of permitted services, to a facilitator whose role is to educate and empower such projects, while ensuring governance is maintained.

Digital transformation is gathering pace in the Gulf, and is likely to become the new normal for competitive businesses. To this end, the deployment of cloud solutions will continue to accelerate under hybrid IT strategies designed to maximise efficiency and business benefit, while the consequences for those organisations that fail to transform in the face of disruptive market change will be severe.

The columnist is group vice-president and regional managing director for the Middle East, Africa and Turkey at global ICT market intelligence and advisory firm International Data Corporation (IDC) He can be contacted via Twitter @JyotiIDC