To cloud or not to cloud? Business considerations for making the move
With a panacea of Cloud options for businesses to consider, the strategic and technological move to cloud services for any business can be a daunting prospect.
Cloud adoption for some organisations is a seismic transition and the risks and levels of investment must be carefully considered. There are numerous aspects to be considered when transitioning services to the cloud.
Motivations
Your motivations to move to cloud services must consider varying elements including both technical, but also most importantly your business strategic direction. Your strategic vision can routinely change as the global conditions or macro-economic conditions change. Just moving for the sake of technology is not always the best motivation and it is your prudent strategic vision that is the priority. Technology should rather be seen as one of the enablers to achieve your vision.
There are conditions that sometimes force a technology shift and a topical reason is a force majeure event like the current COVID-19 pandemic. This has forced a change in business operating models and therefore the move to cloud has been an accelerated process for most businesses.
When businesses are not being forced to adopt technology and can take a more measured approach, business strategic vision must be carefully considered. This could be factors like growth through mergers and acquisitions, scaling the business into new global territories, bringing new services to market or rationalising costs.
Any significant technological change can introduce a swathe of factors to consider. Some of these are cost, security posture, improved stakeholder engagement and increased risk.
Cost
Cost is paramount to any business and any technological shift needs to consider this. No business should introduce new technological changes resulting in increased cost pressure. The cost reduction both short and long term should be obvious from the outset.
Security
Another key consideration is security. Is the transition to cloud services going to make the business cyber security posture more resilient or less. Any transition to cloud services should have security front and centre.
Stakeholder Engagement
Your stakeholders must also be engaged whether shareholders, employees and where required regulatory or audit bodies. If the required due diligence with stakeholders is not undertaken this could make the adoption more challenging. Perception becomes reality and communication is key.
Risk
Any seismic shift in the way businesses operate is going to introduce risk and if not carefully considered could lead to reputational damage, result in lost customer confidence, and potentially put the business under increased pressure. Business must consider their jurisdictional data responsibilities and impact to data being moved to any cloud services.
Benefits
The benefits to shifting to a cloud model can give business numerous benefits over more traditional methods of consuming technology services. These are primarily, reduced costs, greater agility, improved scalability, improved collaboration and improved recoverability and security.
#1 Recovery
To enable recovery for businesses of all sizes should, you should invest in a robust disaster recovery strategy, but for smaller businesses that may lack the required liquidity and expertise, this can be challenging. Cloud computing can help different sized business enjoy a more robust recovery position. Whether using immutable backups or consuming improved security defences that are natively available in cloud computing.
#2 Reduced Costs
Cloud computing can significantly help to reduce the requirement for high cost of hardware, data centre investment and dealing with complex solutions. Subscription-based model allows for more cost control and removes the pressures of lifecycle management for hardware refreshes. One of the recent phenomena of the pandemic and other geopolitical events, has resulted in a challenging global supply chain. This has increased hardware costs and added delays, both getting hardware manufactured, but also getting the hardware transported globally. By adopting cloud services business can scale on demand and not be at the mercy of the global health of manufacturing or supply chain logistics.
#3 Improved Collaboration
Your businesses can benefit from improved collaboration by adopting a Cloud-based workflow and file-sharing apps that allow updates in real time. The more employees and partners collaborate on documents, the greater the need for robust document control. Before the cloud, employees had to send files back and forth as email attachments to be worked on by one user at a time. Even as the smallest companies become more global, the scope for complication rises. As a result of moving to cloud services, all files are stored centrally, and everyone collaborates on one version.
#4 Access to technology
Moving to the cloud gives you access to enterprise-class technology. It also allows smaller businesses to act faster than big slower moving businesses. Pay-as-you-go service and cloud business applications means smaller businesses can compete with bigger business and disrupt the market, all while remaining lean and nimble.
#5 Positive impact on ESG
For an increasing number of businesses Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG) credentials are becoming more important, with consumers also becoming more aware of this shift to sustainability. When your cloud needs fluctuate, your server capacity can scale up and down as required. You only use what you need, and you don’t leave an unnecessary oversized carbon footprint.