It has become a known and proven fact that the COVID-19 pandemic has underlined the need for an expansionist approach to digital transformation. The world bare witnessed the rampage that the worldwide health crisis had on businesses, education, and entertainment throughout 2020.

With this in mind, governments – especially within Europe – have already stepped up efforts to adapt their economies, as well as their societies to the digital realm in preparation for the upcoming dominance of 5G.

Steps have already been taken by the European Commission who has committed a sum of £7.5 billion to be invested in what it calls the “Digital Europe Programme,” which aims to build the strategic digital capabilities of the EU and facilitate the wide deployment of digital technologies.

Europe’s aggressive approach to digital transformation is mainly due to the profoundly positive impact of the Cloud in changing the day-to-day operations for businesses and their employees.

But while the term has been romanticized by many analysts, the influence introduced by the Cloud were not headline-material, but rather bringing forward the usefulness of agility, where small changes can have a big and wide-ranging impact.

This can be seen through the example of a manufacturing company removing its shared on-premises terminals to allow employees to clock in using personal devices or company tablets, which is both safer and cost effecient. A time study also uncovered a net saving by giving an employee a tablet rather than forcing them to walk to individual terminals.

It’s an example that demonstrates just how much more control employees can have over their working environment, even at a distance, and how a pandemic-led change for safety uncovered efficiencies in an established, and unquestioned, process.

These are mere preliminary functions of what digital transformation has to offer, easily explaining the reason behind the EU’s bank-breaking investment; that is what’s needed to reach the Fourth Industrial Revolution.