What Are the Most Common Benefits Forward-leaning Businesses Are Trying to Achieve in a Cloud Environment?
Scalability
Companies like yours operate within finite budgetary constraints. As a result, it’s important to have predictable expenditures as the organization grows. The cloud allows for your CIO to forecast precisely what the IT expenditures will be as your business makes forward progress. Alternatively, those organizations that have busy and slower seasons are able to scale up and down with fluctuations in the marketplace and demand for their service/product.
Cost-savings
When looking at the ROI of implementing a cloud-based IT environment to house your data and workflow, the entire lifecycle of your IT assets must come into play. For example, in-house IT assets require purchase, maintenance, management, and replacement. Cloud assets have no upfront purchase cost and are continuously managed, maintained, and updated. The other factor that comes into play is the expected increase in efficiency and productivity from cloud assets. When one compares apples to apples, cloud infrastructure comes out the winner in terms of cost-effectiveness.
Unified IT Environment
Right now, most organizations considering the move to the cloud are using both cloud-based applications and in-house infrastructure. This can lead to speedbumps in internal processes that slow down the workflow to full-on roadblocks that keep you from pursuing your next pro-growth action plan. By moving everything into a cloud environment, the integration of applications and the automation of manual processes are simplified.
Digital Transformation
As we mentioned earlier, mature companies that are trying to match wits with their younger, venture-backed competition realize that they too must view technology as a business enabler. Digital transformation is not something that can be tacked onto a business, but rather, it is how a business views its processes today and its potential tomorrow based on what current and emerging technologies can do. Because of the unlimited power and capacity of the cloud, it is the perfect place to explore and implement digital transformation strategies.
Flexibility
In 1965, Gordon Moore – then CEO and Co-founder of Intel – made the observation that because the number of transistors in a microprocessors seem to double each year, the computing power available doubles each year as well. Moore’s Law (as his observation has been dubbed) has proven true in the rapid pace of technology growth since that day. The cloud allows you the flexibility needed to take advantage of rapid technology changes and expansion almost in real-time. (More on Moore’s Law in our next article, “Hidden Cloud Benefits – What the Marketing Departments of Cloud Technology Companies Forget to Tell You.” (link this to article #2)
Speed of Deployment for New Services/Products
Beating your competitor to market may mean the difference between gaining the majority of market share or eating the crumbs left by the guy who got to market first. In 1802, Humphrey Davy came up with the first electric light, the Electric Arc Lamp, almost 77 years before Thomas Edison invented the incandescent light bulb in 1879. Between Davy and Edison were at least four other recorded inventors that had their version of an electric light source. So why did we all use Edison’s light bulbs until the recent adoption of halogen and LED bulbs? Because Edison was the first to bring a commercially viable bulb to market.
That’s what the cloud does for you.
Need a satellite office set up in Seattle tomorrow? – It can be done. The information connectivity part of it happens in a matter of minutes. Need the infrastructure to support a product roll out by next Thursday? – not a problem. It’s a few keystrokes.
Business Continuity
It’s not a stretch at all to say that if you don’t have geo-redundant cloud backups and cloud-based workflow assets, you don’t really have business continuity. Unfortunately, many companies are reliant upon an in-house server to save the day when things go bad. But storms like Katrina, pandemics like COVID19, and ransomware attacks like WannaCry demonstrate that an in-house server just isn’t up to the task of protecting confidential client information, proprietary data, and critical workflow.
Backup and Disaster Recovery
Closely related to and a key component of a robust Business continuity strategy is Backup and Disaster Recovery. Protecting your data from theft, fire, flood, storms, power outages, and human error is essential, and the cloud is the secure, efficient way to meet that goal. Automatic, verifiable, monitored backups of data into a cloud environment help you meet industry standard and compliance requirements.
If you’ve been considering the cloud for a while now and reading blogs and marketing materials from cloud hosting companies, you’ve likely seen these cloud advantages repeatedly. What is needed is a team of cloud specialists to help you put all the pieces together so your company can begin to benefit from working in a cloud environment. Don’t get left behind, IronOrbit is here to help.