5 Key Areas to Focus on While Integrating Cloud-based Strategies
Are you tired of maintaining an IT team that performs the same mundane tasks of procuring hardware, maintaining server upgrades, ensuring security compliance, resolving routing loop issues, maintaining backups and other arcane operations chores?
Today, chances are, that 99% of your competition has moved at least one of their applications to the cloud. The wide range of offerings that cloud service providers offer allows businesses to avoid allocating a large number of their staff to do non-core business tasks. This advantage of being able to concentrate all of your energies on your core business cannot be missed.
Can ‘follow the competition’ be your only reason to move to the cloud? It is imperative for decision makers to script their own cloud strategy and how it fits in their company’s near and long-term vision. Let us look at the key areas to focus on and the benefits to be derived while integrating cloud-based operations in your enterprise.
1. Reducing your total cost of ownership,
Reducing total cost of ownership may involve moving some assets from CapEx to OpEx, reduction of IT skill sets to deliver, or reducing the cost of resources required to maintain your overall IT infrastructure.
2. Optimizing business requirements/operations
Operations compliance related to data security and the need to modernize your business requires a business optimization approach while deciding on your cloud strategy.
3. New innovations/revenue streams
Monetizing your data, or increasing business agility, will require an innovative cloud strategy to get started.
4. Flexibility
The cloud brings in new features of rapid elasticity, on-demand provisioning, independently scalable, and deployable microservices, which were not available in in-premise or datacenter offerings. Businesses capitalizing of these new features while moving to the cloud will carry a sustained competitive advantage with them.
5. Third-party assistance
Engaging a cloud expert as an advisor to help you to blueprint your cloud strategy is of utmost importance. The cloud expert can educate your decision makers of the new added benefits of cloud-like elasticity, server-less computing, artificial intelligence ready-to-use models, etc. while setting flags of the risks of security, compliance, data leak, and backup strategy. An educated foresight on how the cloud would revolutionize your customers and vendors is a must while developing your cloud strategy.
Many cloud vendors have emerged in the last 10 years. There seems to be an agreement amongst the top 3 cloud vendors on the basic services and cloud features to be offered. Their deep-pocket investments to make their platforms more usable and make self-service a reality adds a sense of comfort while making a decision on a long-term partner. Selecting a cloud service provider is like a buying decision between Washington apples vs. the Himachal apples. While one cloud service provider comes with a huge experience in search and AI, the other’s expertise in handling a huge number of transactions cannot be ruled out. Though offerings look similar, their differences should be accounted while making a decision.
Article provided by PartnerOn and entrepreneur.com.