The organisational advantages of cloud are clear through its inherent scalability, resilience and security. However, some organisations are at risk of not achieving the full potential and value of cloud solutions if they don’t align their business objectives with their technology strategy.
Making sure the appropriate stakeholders are involved throughout the program creates a strategic and solid foundation for your cloud strategy. As well as providing, across the business, an understanding of how cloud can assist and ensure buy-in.
In this article we look at the different objectives your organisation could be striving for, and how cloud can align to support these goals.
Increase agility and innovation
The speed of business is accelerating along with customer demands. Businesses can leverage new technologies without long term investment to prove value concepts or return on investment in isolated, secure and managed environments.
An agile infrastructure and application strategy is essential to compete effectively and remain innovative. Agility is the development of a physical or digital product with just enough features to satisfy early customers or prove a use-case, encompassing far lower costs, a shorter timeframe, and overall less risk.
Innovate cost-effectively and with confidence
Cloud supports companies wanting to accelerate their transformation and it helps them create new business opportunities. The capabilities that lie within cloud-native services, including advanced analytics and machine learning, are enabling companies to reimagine ways to improve customer experiences, reduce costs and respond quicker to market conditions.
Legacy infrastructure is often too rigid and expensive to keep up with the rapid experimentation needed early on and the agility required to scale a successful effort. Cloud models enable a level of personalised service and revenue generation not possible in the world of traditional IT. Think everything-as-a-service such as internet-connected home services and healthcare demand, all based on carefully crafted cloud and digital strategies.
System availability
The cloud embodies the idea of anywhere and anytime access to services, applications and data. To build systems with this kind of reliability and availability has historically incurred large costs for organisations. In a traditional environment, servers are layered dependant on their importance. Top tier servers for production environments, test layers for the next best servers and typically oldest for development. With the advent of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) technologies, the costs of attaining high availability and decreasing deployment risk, have decreased dramatically.
By designing resilience into your model, applications across local and geographically separated infrastructure can handle degradation from load spikes, outages and denial-of-service attacks, keeping your service available but within a defined and budgeted spend.
Seasonality and managing unpredictable workloads
Demand, capacity and performance requirements change dependant on changes to your market, seasonal demand and legislative changes. The cloud offers a platform capable of matching those dynamic requirements whilst allowing you to avoid overspend and under recovery.
Through automatic scaling of resources, you can increase your ability to accommodate demand changes whilst giving you a known and controlled spend. Respond quickly to unpredictable competitor activity by leveraging new technologies without long term investment to prove value concepts or return on investment in isolated, secure and managed environments.
Reduce CAPEX spend and align budgets
You will want to deploy applications and data across a range of platforms, whilst ensuring your services are always sized correctly to support your key periods and align to your budgets. A hybrid IT model can help you plan and forecast spend, utilisation and capacity, and justify future workload migration decisions. The creation of defined usage policies and notifications can help you keep a close eye on cloud usage, avoiding cost overruns and analysing the data to make more informed decisions.
A trusted partner can support you with budgeting for the best technology that will increase revenue, decrease costs, improve productivity and enhance customer experiences. No matter the cloud environment.
Support sensitive workloads
Private cloud has established itself as a solid choice for organisations handling sensitive workloads. Compliance and security standards and a generally lower risk appetite make the secure, dedicated and customisable nature of private cloud hugely appealing, especially when you can still leverage the scalability and flexibility inherent in the public cloud model. The higher costs over public cloud need to be seen in the context of the value provided by having a compliant, flexible infrastructure under your control.
For more information on how to create a cloud strategy to meet your business objectives, please contact us at sayhello@redcentricplc.com
