The cloud is going to be the core operating system of the future, a plug-and-play environment that shapes the way businesses evolve rather than just supporting what they already do.

The capabilities it can bring will help bold and innovative companies to be far better at customer service, increase their revenues and secure their future, according to several speakers at the Huawei Connect conference held recently in Shanghai.

Achieving 'cloudification' is complicated, however, and the strategy has to be thrashed out between each individual company and its chosen technology partners.

Huawei aims to become a dominant cloud player through its products, software and telecoms capabilities, and by working with numerous other IT partners to create an eco-system that gives customers everything they need, said Ken Hu, one of the company's three rotating CEOs.

Huawei is building a device, pipe and cloud strategy, with pipes including optical networks delivering high bandwidth and low latency. Its 5G networks will have 50-times better latency than 4G networks, which are too slow to even play Pokemon properly, he joked.

Hu believes the inevitable outcome will be a system of global, interconnected computers hosting a massive amount of data, knowledge and documents. This "digital brain in the cloud" will be able to learn by itself and evolve continuously.

"The digital brain will never grow old and can provide wisdom for machines and humans which we can use at any time," he said.

By 2025, all enterprises will use cloud technologies and 85% of their workload will be conducted in public, private or hybrid clouds, Hu predicts.

But cloudification is a huge step that involves choosing the right technologies and changing the business model to capitalise on opportunities presented by artificial intelligence, big data and the ability to customise the output for individual consumers.

The talent to do that is extremely scarce. That's partly why the eco-system is crucial, so companies can draw on specialist skills rather than try to handle tasks in-house. CIOs themselves, however, will need to be visionary masters.

"The CIO's influence will expand far beyond technology itself in the future. They will play a new role in setting strategy and driving business innovation. They have huge potential in the years to come and those with the ability to promote these ideas will be worth their weight in gold," Hu said.

Most companies still run as silos with insufficient sharing of data, but smarter devices and infrastructure and the integration of data in the cloud is changing that, said Yan Lida, president of Huawei Enterprises. But different industries have different secrets for doing business, so Huawei is working with customers and partners in different ways to create the correct solution. It currently has 36 joint development centres around the world working on cloud capabilities for various industries.

"We have to migrate traditional workloads and develop new workloads. This challenge is beyond the capabilities of the enterprises themselves so they need additional help," Lida said. However, it's important for a company to develop the skills to operate the cloud itself for innovation and security purposes.

SAP's CIO Thomas Saueressig agreed that a cloud architecture needs data protection, privacy, security, reliability and integration with legacy enterprise systems, but security must be invisible to the user and the processes must run seamlessly.

IT must adapt to how people work, not the other way around, he added. "Innovations are happening by connecting people and mobility is the working style of preference."

Operating in the cloud should be as simple as breathing, Saueressig said, which seems utterly simple but is actually one of nature's most complicated processes. To achieve that, every company will depend on well-chosen partnerships.

Do it right, and it will free the IT staff to think about the other innovations that the company could deliver, he said. A cloud platform makes it easier to adopt new technologies like block chain, artificial intelligence and the Internet of things, which all demand heavy data.

"If you move your business systems and collaborative tools to the cloud you will achieve a truly digital workplace and improve collaboration and productivity. It will improve the business if you provide the right tools because your workers will be happier and happiness is a competitive advantage."

Cloudification is a one-way street, he said. "Once you go down that path you see the advantages so quickly you don't want to move back. You lay the foundation for the future growth and scale of your company."