As a business owner or top executive, you have heard about the “Cloud” and may have even directed your team to begin exploring or moving to the cloud. But what does this mean to you and your business?

For the smaller business owner that does not have an elaborate network and set of servers, moving to the cloud might mean consuming all of their software as a service – Email, Collaboration & Office apps, Accounting, HR, Payroll Service, Project Management, CRM, Point-Of-Sale, Web, Surveys, Marketing, Customer Support, Help Desk, and Telecommunications.

For a medium sized business (<$500 million), most businesses have an IT department, networks, internal applications, servers, data centers, help desk, capital budgets, operating budgets, planned obsolescence. Moving fully to the cloud means moving all hardware and apps to the cloud. Many companies choose to implement a hybrid cloud where part of the business is on the cloud and part is self hosted.

What are the reasons why this move should be accelerated? What difference is this going to make in my business?

1.    Agility & Scalability

A key benefit often discussed about cloud computing is how it enables agility. This benefit is real and powerful. However, the term agility is used to describe cloud agility and business agility; both are real, but business agility will ultimately offer the greatest impact.

What does cloud agility mean? It’s tied to the rapid provisioning of computer resources. In 2020 and beyond it is not acceptable to wait on 5 layers of budget approvals and 4-8 more weeks for IT to deliver a new server. With the public cloud, you can provision a new virtual server in under 15 minutes

If cloud agility is viewed as an internal IT optimization with little effect on how quickly IT innovation rolls out into mainline business processes, the potential exists for IT to never receive the business support. It is a huge mistake to view cloud computing as a technology that helps IT do its job faster. Internal IT agility is necessary but not sufficient for the future. More important will be to tie the application of cloud computing to business agility, speeding business innovation to the marketplace. Both kinds of agility are good, but the latter is profound and should be the aim of your cloud computing efforts.

Businesses have traditionally maintained some reserve for unexpected growth of their computing needs. Additional servers, software licenses, and storage capacity would sit around idle to cover additional needs or backups if needed. Cloud computing solutions are scalable in that they always have extra capacity available if you need it. If your business unexpectedly adds staff, or otherwise needs additional resources, adding them is a snap. It takes just a few minutes to add them to the system.

2.    Security

While housing your technical business infrastructure inside the Cloud may sound less secure than an in-house server, in many cases it creates a much more secure environment. Maintaining security on a local IT system also requires much more time and manpower, making it much harder to plug all the holes in an expanding IT system.

The deployment of basic elements like virtual networks, firewalls, load balancers, WAF, and application gateways are usually cheaper (if not free), require no capital outlay, induce no obsolescence, facilitate faster implementation and removes vendor dependence. 

Thinking about physical security, picture the server in your office. It may be in a closet or storage room, or may even be more secure than that in a managed data center. But, is it as secure as a fully-managed Tier 4 data center with multiple locked doors and 24/7 security personnel? Cloud takes security a lot more seriously than you think. Major Software as a Service (SaaS) vendors also take security extremely seriously as the trust you place in them is a major factor in why you purchase their services. Microsoft, Salesforce, NetSuite, Concur, etc. all adhere to the top security standards. 

With security at the forefront of everyone’s minds these days due to all the news of hacked services, all companies should hold security as a top priority. Cloud solutions like Azure, AWS or Google Cloud use data centers that meet a number of different security and compliance standards. This allows businesses to become almost instantly compliant for many regulations. With a public cloud platform, HIPAA, SSAE, PCI, ISO, SOC, DSS, and many more regulations are met when hosting begins. This takes the onus off of you and your IT team, ensuring that your company won’t need to perform constant security reviews and stress over audits for hardware and provided services. Companies on the cloud still need to implement addition.

3.    High Availability & Redundancy

Your business system and the data stored within it are backed up to multiple secure locations, including data centers in different states, ensuring you can access business materials and avoid downtime. These cloud data facilities ensure that your infrastructure is always available and consistently backed up in case of emergencies. The importance of a robust solution for data protection and recovery is unquestionable and you are able to pay for the level of reliability and redundancy necessary for your business. Cloud computing is an ideal solution here, providing your business with both backup and disaster recovery.

What would happen if your office/workspace experienced a disaster this very minute? How long until your network is back up; how long until you/your employees can start working again. With a robust cloud solution, an issue or disaster affecting your office won’t harm your network infrastructure in the cloud. The disaster recovery solution you need can be tailored to your business. Cloud products typically are housed in redundant, secure data centers staffed by experts in hardware reliability, data protection and related disciplines. If you need absolute to-the-second rollover recovery, you can pay for it, if not the public cloud providers have other redundancy mechanisms in place. They are in the business of reliability. The minimum uptime percentage in cloud provider SLA’s is 99.9% and only goes up from there.

The cloud also offers end user device freedom meaning that employees can work from almost any device and receive the same computing experience. Saving you money by keeping you from having to buy the latest and greatest hardware. No matter the device you are physically on, you are working off of the high-powered computer in the cloud. If you have a local hardware issue, you hop onto another computer in the office or pick up a new one and log back in and hop right back to where you left off in most circumstances. As long as you have an Internet connection, you will be able to work.

The top-tier management tools that come with working in the cloud make the network simple to administer and manage. Managing IT systems with cloud products means you get an easy-to-understand user-friendly interface; where things like managing permissions, adding users, and adding storage & resources are a breeze.

4.      Lower Costs Of Ownership

According to a recent whitepaper by IDC, customers that migrate to a public cloud can experience 51% reduced costs of operations, 62% increased IT staff productivity, and 94% reductions in downtime.

Integration – Cloud services can integrate easily with other services. Few organizations use a single platform or supplier for every aspect of their business. Most companies search for the best option for each specific function and end up needing to be able to access and analyze data stored on different platforms.

Consequently, compatibility between platforms is a must. Cloud solutions tend to use industry standards for identity and data interchange and generally integrate better with different systems than non-cloud solutions.

Infrastructure Staff – Many companies get to experience significantly less infrastructure staff needs if they commit to full cloud adoption. Many companies who dip their toe into the cloud end up with more staff, full staff for legacy hardware and additional cloud staff. In our experience, an organization with 10 infrastructure staff can typically manage a native cloud environment with 3-5 staff members. The difference is the staff has different and more rounded skills and the administration of the infrastructure is much easier to maintain. If cloud is treated as a POC or something to explore, you run the risk of developing a “shadow” organization and increase costs.

Controlled Cost – Cloud services are inherently “pay-as-you-use”. For almost all public cloud services, the cost is highly predictable and able to be project precisely. This allows predictable budgeting. The only catch is that all expenditures on the cloud are operating expense instead of capital expenditures.  

Network and Telecommunications – The corporate network can typically be heavily simplified in a native cloud implementation, saving money. Native cloud adoption usually allows companies to eliminate costly network telecommunications like MLPS or dedicated circuits between offices.

Phone systems (even ones that are based on VOIP) are expensive to maintain. Employees want and need to work from home and on travel, so serious thought needs to be given to adopting a cloud-based phone system that can travel with a laptop or mobile. A cloud-based phone system can make cost predicable and overall less for the organization.

Network appliances and their maintenance can be reduced for your office in many circumstances. If nothing else, the network equipment quantity and complexity can be reduced.

Minimal Maintenance – Traditionally, it’s very common for corporate offices and businesses to have 1 or more servers on-site. Not anymore! Working natively in the cloud eliminates the need for in-house servers. You just need a desktop computer, laptop, tablet, or smartphone to connect to the internet and your cloud servers and workstation environment; saving businesses tons on hardware purchases, upgrades, and maintenance.

When working with a cloud solution, our experience has shown clients typically experience far fewer issues and troubleshooting. Running into fewer problems should require less intervention and support, resulting in a lower overall IT expense and potentially less staff needed to maintain.

5.      Process Optimization

Moving to the cloud is a perfect time to rethink processes. Your competitiveness and operational effectiveness depend on process efficiency, automation and speed. Transformation needs to happen with eliminating waste, building quality in, creating knowledge, fast delivery, optimizing process steps and automating business functions. Business leaders need to demand simplification, agility to changing business conditions, speed of delivery, and an overall commitment to meeting customer demands. 

Change can cause fear and resistance, for instance IT staff might fear that simplification of daily operation through automation might make them obsolete versus concentrating on how it can improve their work life balance. Once IT staff realize automation can reduce the need to respond to down-time outages, slow-time latency or the need to over-manage resource pools, the more valuable they become. IT staff makes it possible for them to be more innovative and work on mission-critical projects versus infrastructure life-cycle management. This increases their contribution to the business and therefore profitability, making them indispensable. Change is good when it enhances the professional growth and value of the people it impacts.

6.      Mobility – Work Anywhere

Working on the go, and from any device, has never been easier for the modern worker. In the post-Covid-19 world, this is now an unavoidable reality. In today’s working world, we expect to bring our job with us wherever we go, because everything you need is accessible if you have a stable connection to the Internet. Not only can you access emails and conversations on the go, you can access all your files and even see your desktop from a phone, tablet, laptop, or other device outside the office. From the cloud application or web portal, you can jump back into your desktop or work stream from nearly any internet-connected device. In fact, the business owner and technology leader needs to seriously consider moving to a cloud-based telephony system as a mobility and cost cutting solution. The day of the purchased phone system / PBX is almost over.

Mobility also means that you may want to “trust” and monitor mobile telephones and “Bring Your Own Device” devices as well. This can help you insure your data integrity and security standards.

7.    Competitiveness

Research has found that 77% of organizations feel that cloud computing has given them a competitive advantage, with 16% of respondents claiming that this advantage is significant. A report by Dell supports this as it found that organizations actively using cloud computing have higher revenue growth rates than those who aren’t.

Cloud adopters are gaining competitive advantages in several areas. First, the cloud facilitates a quicker route to market as software suppliers can quickly build and launch new applications without lengthy installation and configuration processes and software customers can then easily sign up to and start using these services.

Second, leveraging the power of the cloud also provides organizations with a competitive advantage as cloud computing enables IT teams to shift their focus from the routine support and maintenance of software infrastructure to strategic projects that contribute towards business growth.

Third, the cloud enables organizations to optimize costs and achieve greater financial flexibility providing a competitive advantage over those not utilizing the cloud, as with cloud hosted software you only pay for what you use. The cloud also provides organizations with tools to improve collaboration between employees across boundaries, borders and time zones which provides an advantage in the form of better collaboration which helps accelerate business results, improve business processes and stimulate innovation.

Lastly, one of the biggest competitive advantages that organizations set to benefit from by migrating to the cloud is access to big data and analytic tools that can sort through lots of unstructured data quickly to derive insights for better business decisions without having to invest precious capital to test them out.

2023 Silas Tate. All Rights Reserved