What is Digital Transformation?

Digital transformation is when an organization takes advantage of new technologies to redesign and redefine relationships with their customers, employees, and partners. Digital transformation for business covers everything from modernizing applications and creating new business models to building new products and services for customers.

Organizations choose digital transformation frameworks as a way to reimagine themselves staying competitive in their respective businesses and industries.

Learn more about the Anthos modernization platform, integrated open source cloud ecosystems, and the role both can play in digital transformation.

Ready to get started? New customers get $300 in free credits to spend on Google Cloud.

Why KeyBank turned to Google Cloud video

Learn more why KeyBank turned to Google Cloud for their digital transformation

Digital transformation defined

Digital transformation uses modern digital technologies—including all types of public, private, and hybrid cloud platforms—to create or modify business processes, culture, and customer experiences to meet changing business and market dynamics.

Digital transformation drives foundational change in how an organization operates, optimizes internal resources, and delivers value to customers. Cloud technologies provide the foundation for becoming more agile, collaborative, and customer focused.

Technologies driving digital transformation

Digital transformation is propelled by a range of innovative technologies that are reshaping industries and redefining business possibilities. These technologies enable organizations to streamline operations, gain valuable insights from data, and deliver innovative products and services. Some of the core technologies driving digital transformation include:

Cloud computing

Cloud computing helps assist how businesses store, process, and access data. By leveraging cloud platforms like Google Cloud, organizations can scale their IT infrastructure on demand, reduce costs, and facilitate distributed teamwork. Cloud computing services provide the foundation for many digital transformation initiatives, enabling businesses to be more agile, flexible, and responsive to changing market dynamics.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)

AI and ML can help transform business operations and decisions. These technologies can empower organizations to automate complex tasks, gain insights from vast amounts of data, and deliver personalized customer experiences. AI and ML can be used across various business functions, from customer service chatbots and predictive maintenance in manufacturing to fraud detection in financial services and personalized recommendations in e-commerce. Google Cloud offers tools and services such as Vertex AI to help organizations leverage the power of AI and ML.

Big data and analytics

The ability to collect, process, and analyze large volumes of data is crucial for digital transformation. Big data analytics tools enable organizations to collect, store, and organize data to identify trends and make more informed data-driven decisions.

What are the benefits of digital transformation?

Modernize infrastructure

Use technology infrastructure more effectively, whether using containers, moving to serverless computers, or taking advantage of a chosen cloud platform’s global network.

Manage data

Use new tools and capabilities to better manage the huge amounts of data coming from different devices, sources, and systems.

Gain insight

Sharpen the focus on smarter business analytics with the most advanced tools to drive keener insight into data.

Break down team silos

Use modern digital tools to speed collaboration across all teams and geographies to deliver more value and faster results for customers.

Solve business problems

Implement new digital technologies and modernize processes and applications to quickly pinpoint and solve problems related to how a business operates and interacts with customers.

Realize cost savings

Use digital tools to streamline processes and to identify top-performing and low-performing areas of the business.

What are examples of digital transformation?

Here are some examples of digital transformation frameworks for business and industry that highlight how new capabilities can be delivered:

Focus on the customer experience

Use analytics tools to build richer content experiences and create deeper connections with audiences via websites and mobile.

Reimagine operations and development

Move from physical data centers to a modern cloud platform to speed deployment time, boost stability, and get new products to market faster.

Example: A software company migrates its development environment to Google Cloud, helping to reduce deployment time and improve application performance.

Modernize core technology

Reinvent optimized internal service delivery and introduce new digital capabilities by migrating applications to VM instances on a private cloud.

Example: A financial services company migrates its legacy applications to Compute Engine, helping to improve scalability, reduce costs, and enhance security.

Improve internal collaboration

Turn on powerful collaboration tools like video conferencing to unlock the shared creativity and productivity of employees.

Example: A global manufacturing company implements Google Workspace, enabling seamless collaboration among teams in different locations and helping improve project turnaround time.

Empower editorial decision-making

Use pretrained machine learning models to perform entity extraction, offering publications insight on content matches and trending news topics.

Example: A news organization uses Natural Language AI to analyze articles and identify trending topics, enabling editors to make data-driven decisions about content creation.

Solve your business challenges with Google Cloud

New customers get $300 in free credits to spend on Google Cloud.

Talk to a Google Cloud sales specialist to discuss your unique challenge in more detail.

Why is digital transformation important?

Digital transformation is what propels businesses and industries forward. Organizations of all sizes—from startups to global enterprises—choose digital transformation not only to make scaled improvements, but also to drive significant change and fully embrace the digital age. It requires a strong commitment from both businesses and IT teams, as well as a willingness to support the resulting changes.

The journey to digital transformation incorporates:

Flexible technology to build, deploy, and manage applications more quickly in the cloud
Experimentation to embrace new ideas and gain new insights on customer and market demands
Measurement of experimentation results with data analysis to guide decision-making
Collaboration across organizational boundaries with tools for quick knowledge sharing
Customer focus and data analysis to deliver greater value to customers
Agility to scale and accelerate without hesitation to succeed in the digital age

Related products and services

Google Cloud can help organizations take advantage of advances Google has made in AI and machine learning.

Anthos supports a global-scale distributed infrastructure with the flexibility to modernize applications and build, run, and manage workloads within data centers—and on Google Cloud or other cloud providers—without making changes.

The Google integrated open source ecosystem brings the best of open source to Google Cloud by making it even more accessible with a cloud-native experience.