- According to McKinsey, approximately 70% of corporate transformations fail to meet their objectives, often due to a lack of alignment between business and technology.
- Gartner projected $723.4 billion USD in global public cloud service spending for 2025, an increase of 21.5% compared to 2024.
- According to IBM's 2025 Cost of a Data Breach report, a data breach costs an average of $4.44 million USD, and 97% of AI-related incidents involved systems without adequate access controls.
- PlanAxion positions the solution architect as a strategic partner who translates business objectives into a realistic, scalable, and sustainable technological vision.
At a time when organizations are modernizing their systems, migrating to the cloud, adopting artificial intelligence, and navigating increasing cybersecurity and compliance requirements, the solutions architect has become a strategic partner to both executives and technical teams. The numbers speak for themselves.
Seventy percent of transformations fail. Source: McKinsey & Company, Perspectives on transformation
Three pressures are redefining the role of the solutions architect:
- Transformations that go off track: approximately 70% of transformations fail to meet their objectives, according to McKinsey.
- Massive cloud migration: $723.4 billion USD in global public cloud spending projected for 2025, an increase of 21.5%, according to Gartner.
- Data to secure and govern: an average cost of $4.44 million USD per data breach and 97% of AI-related incidents lacking adequate access controls, according to IBM.
Why does the solutions architect start with business challenges?
Because the value of an architecture is measured first by its ability to serve the organization's goals, not by its technical elegance. Contrary to popular belief, the architect does not begin their work in front of a technical diagram. They start by understanding the organization.
What are the business objectives? Which processes need improvement? What are the risks? How can technology generate measurable value? This first step involves translating business needs into a realistic, scalable, and sustainable technological vision. It is also the best antidote to the McKinsey finding: transformations rarely fail due to a lack of technology, but rather due to a lack of alignment and commitment.
How do you design an architecture adapted to modern transformations?
By ensuring interoperability, data governance, security, scalability, and resilience from the design phase. Current projects are rarely isolated. They often involve multiple platforms, cloud environments, SaaS applications, ERP solutions, artificial intelligence tools, and hundreds of integrations. According to Gartner, 90% of organizations will have adopted a hybrid cloud approach by 2027.
In this context, the solutions architect must design an architecture that ensures:
- system interoperability;
- data quality and governance;
- information security;
- platform scalability;
- infrastructure resilience.
Their role is to prevent the decisions made today from becoming the constraints of tomorrow.
What is the architect's role during project execution?
They remain involved from start to finish: supporting teams, validating technical choices, and arbitrating trade-offs. Once the design is complete, the architect supports development teams, ensures adherence to architectural standards, and intervenes when trade-offs must be made between business needs, costs, timelines, and technical constraints.
They act as a convergence point between business experts, project managers, IT teams, and technology partners. This cross-functional position makes them a permanent translator between the language of business and the language of technology—a decisive factor in keeping the project aligned with its original value.
How does the architect prepare the organization for artificial intelligence?
By building the foundations that AI requires: quality, governed, sovereign, and secure data. The architect's role does not end at deployment. They ensure that solutions remain high-performing, secure, and capable of evolving with the organization's needs.
The arrival of artificial intelligence further accelerates this responsibility. Companies must now think about the quality of their data, its governance, their digital sovereignty, and their ability to quickly integrate new technologies. The risks of improvisation are well-documented: according to the IBM Cost of a Data Breach 2025 report, a data breach costs an average of $4.44 million USD, and 97% of AI-related security incidents involved systems lacking adequate access controls. The architect contributes directly to this preparation. To learn more, read our article on the difference between traditional AI and generative AI.
A strategic role in the success of transformations
Digital projects have become much more complex than they were a few years ago. They no longer consist simply of implementing a new application, but of transforming ways of working, integrating emerging technologies, and protecting increasingly strategic digital assets. In this context, the solutions architect plays a decisive role: through their understanding of business challenges and technology, they enable organizations to make better decisions, reduce risks, and accelerate value creation.
At PlanAxion Solutions, our architects guide organizations through their digital transformation, platform modernization, cloud migration, and artificial intelligence adoption projects. Our goal: to design robust, scalable architectures aligned with business priorities to turn strategic ambitions into concrete results.
Jean-François Tassé has over 30 years of experience in information technology. He possesses expertise in solution architecture, digital transformation, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.
Frequently asked questions
What exactly does a solution architect do?
A solution architect translates business objectives into a realistic, scalable, and sustainable technological vision. They design system architecture, validate technical choices during implementation, manage trade-offs between requirements, costs, and timelines, and ensure that solutions remain high-performing and secure after deployment.
What is the difference between a solution architect and a technical architect?
A technical architect focuses on a specific platform or technology. A solution architect covers a broader scope—that of a project or program—and acts as a bridge between business challenges and all technological components, including data, integrations, security, and cloud infrastructure.
When should a solution architect be involved in a project?
Right from the start, even before choosing technologies. It is during the early stages that the architect translates business needs into a technological vision and prevents today's decisions from becoming tomorrow's constraints. They then remain involved throughout implementation and after deployment to ensure the solution evolves effectively.
Why is the architect's role becoming more important with artificial intelligence?
Because AI requires high-quality, governed, and sovereign data. According to IBM's 2025 Cost of a Data Breach report, 97% of AI-related security incidents involved systems without adequate access controls. The architect structures these foundations to integrate AI quickly without exposing the organization to risk.