With data expanding rapidly outside the traditional four-wall data centers that have long sufficed for processing, traditional paradigms simply can’t hold up in the digital transformation. Enterprises now face the challenge of balancing new demands with existing infrastructure, shifting org structure and business strategy alike.

“You’ve got the challenge of trying to support your digital transformation initiatives, and it’s throwing all the underlying infrastructure foundations that an entire generation of IT [information technolgy] professionals has known into disarray,” said Peter Smails (pictured), VP of marketing and business development at Datos IO Inc. Rapid advancements in digital transformation are impacting businesses across industries in tremendous and unforeseen ways, and driving orgs to reinvent employee roles to promote a more data-driven enterprise.

Peter Smails and Chris Cummings, senior advisor to new technology ventures at Chasm Institute LLC, paid a visit to theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and spoke with host John Furrier (@furrier) at SiliconANGLE’s Palo Alto studio in California to talk about these transformations and offer insights, as well as predictions on where they’ll take the business in the future.

Collaborations key to transformation

As storage transitions from traditional data centers to elastic computing, infrastructure isn’t the only system that needs updating. Customers, organizations, and individual roles within IT teams are changing, and companies must adapt to secure the benefits of newly available tech.

“You see chief transformation officers, you see chief digital officers, you see system architects and DBAs, getting a more prominent role in the conversation,” Smails said. The proliferation of new personas can provide a challenge, and successful enterprises must focus on fostering collaborations from the onset to ensure streamlined work across teams and gain an edge in the disruption.

Further challenging IT teams is the fundamental re-architecting of the underlying stack vendors are pursuing in an effort to become more customer driven. “What used to be a monolithic-oriented, traditional, relational, on-prem database is now running in a microservices highly distributed configuration. … IT is challenged with … keeping up with that pace of change,” Smails said.

The pressure to migrate data to the cloud often stems from the idea that it will be far cheaper than previous processes systems, which is not universally true for all businesses. The move must be made strategically, and founded in a deep consideration for the value some variation on cloud or hybrid cloud can bring the company. “They’ve got to take what they were spending and move it to the things that are going to make money for them,” Cummings said.

For those just beginning their journey toward reinvention, Smails recommends maintaining core data in traditional processes and pushing ancillary data to the cloud to make room for innovation. “If you do it right, the cloud actually can give you architectural independence,” he said.

Taking a step toward the cloud is a smart move for businesses in any industry, as the trend toward digital transformation appears poised for even more growth. “The traditional IT stack is being disrupted, and it’s all about embracing this application-centric, data-driven view of the world,” Smails concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage.

Photo: SiliconANGLE