Why Bother with Cloud?!
Cloud computing has now been around for quite some time, yet it’s still amazing how confusion persists on why one would even bother to go there as an IT department or business. When it comes to IT, the saying “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” should hold, no?
All companies big to small rely on technology more than ever, that’s just a fact of life in the Information Age. Everywhere you look, there are people staring at and using computers, from their mobile phones, watches, tablets, TVs, vehicles and of course laptops and desktops. How we interact, shop, socialize, get notified and communicate has changed…as have our interactions with clients, vendors and partners. We’re all using various cloud experiences even though we might not always think of them all as “cloud”.
So, can I still run my business without cloud? Well… its like a delivery business in the early 1900s asking whether they will need the automobile or just keep using horses!!. You sure can try!!
And if you haven’t gone cloud in the IT department, then you can place a good bet that somewhere in your business it’s already happened. Various convenient SaaS cloud collaboration services exist for project management (Asana, Trello…), HR (Workday, HRcloud…), CRM (Salesforce, Hubspot, Dynamics 365…), Finance (Quickbooks, Netsuite…) and ERP (SAP, Oracle….), just to point out a few of the thousands available.
And there are still existing software purchases in many organizations that need to run somewhere or are perhaps you’re developing your own applications that need hosting, monitoring, patching, backups, disaster recovery and more. Do you keep building it all from scratch? Or leverage cloud computing (Azure, AWS, GCP, OCI etc) to avoid the time and effort?
It all really comes down to how best to improve your business, better your customer experience, increase revenues and profits. In today’s environment businesses really require what cloud can best deliver:
Speed, pace and agility are not usually associated with IT departments, yet businesses require them to deal with changing conditions. Consider from 2001’s 9/11 attack, to the 2008 financial crisis or 2020’s Covid 19. Being able to have technology adapt your business model for Work from Home, Online Selling or Curb-side Pickup, technology cannot be the cause of a slow change or slow adaption to new conditions. IT needs a flexible platform to deal with anything that comes their way, quickly!
Innovation of your business, processes and capabilities requires a mentality of “try fast, fail fast”, learn from it and evolve to something better! Cloud ensures that technology, its availability and scale is not the impediment to new ways of doing business. Instead, cloud allows for quick experimentation at a fraction of cost and much faster than any capex procurement model can achieve. It also reduces the amount of IT effort required to set up and manage application environments, do QA testing or enable and practice disaster recovery (DR).
Affordable Disaster Recovery and Higher Resilience - Ever try to fund full DR capabilities without cloud? It’s hard when dedicated gear is required. Cloud allows for greater on demand abilities, including much of the site to site networking at a fraction of cost, AND includes higher availability with availability sets, zones and regions that are just too expensive to do on your own. Other networking capabilities like gateways and load balancers have automatic redundancies already build in across cloud data centers. The net result is choice in how much availability and DR you can afford.
Modernizing Governance with automated compliance - getting your IT teams to comply with company policy and standards (like Disaster Recovery, Security, Backup and Recovery, Identity and Access etc) is a huge challenge. Often this meant a GRC team using checklists of controls and “trusting” the replies from the tech teams until an audit finds out otherwise!! Well, no longer! The cloud construct enables automated discovery and tagging that can be used to translate instances of VMs and PaaS to actual applications and hence used to determine whether the applications are compliant with successful backups, proper retention, business context etc. Being able to automatically determined new instances daily and determine whether they include business meta data, successful backups, replication, privileged accounts in a PIM/PAM tool etc. is achievable with a bit of code than ever before.
Digital transformation leveraging industry innovations like AI, machine learning (ML), analytics, containers, server-less and low code, to expand and improve business outcomes. No one has the time to stand up and maintain these capabilities from the ground up within their own data centers. Cloud is the foundation that already has significant toolsets, software, and developer environments ready to go. Or in the case of SaaS, full business capabilities. Stop wasting time assembling servers, storage and virtualization with operating systems and software loads, and focus on better business value. Allow less technical folks in the business to automate and make better informed decisions with low code solutions.
The “Great Resignation” and lack of finding hirable employees means that cloud-based productivity tools for existing workers is key to survival and a must have to attract new generations of workers. Doing more with less has become the norm. Using technology to automate mundane office work, integrate between systems, IT operations and security is key to holding the line on new hires. Lobbing off all the email, fileshare, phone and contact center applications simplifies your data center efforts greatly … migrating the remaining servers and storage to cloud reduces efforts around renewals, contract negotiations, capex planning, colocation contracts, racking and cabling of hardware (not to forget labeling them all properly) as well as reducing efforts to install/patch/monitor the hypervisor to virtualize your servers to achieve flexibility.
Other more subtle cloud benefits that your business can enjoy with next to no efforts on your part:
Going green – cloud data centers with their scale are much more efficient than how you can deploy your own data centers UPS, power and A/C cooling. Even many smaller MSP’s and colo providers don’t reach the levels of efficiency of the hyperscale cloud providers. So if you want to reduce your carbon foot print, cloud is the way to go
More Secure – this seems counter-intuitive, but most companies don’t spend enough on security or can hire the 7x24x365 security skills required to effectively ward off attacks and ransomware. Cloud has many security capabilities built in to make it easier to manage and protect environments, like DDOS protection. Cloud also allows for security segmentation between production apps and development using different accounts and subscriptions not to forget that other cloud offerings like Microsoft 365, CRM and HRIS SaaS etc. also segment environments making it more difficult to attack all aspects of an organization. Attack vectors are greatly reduced and isolated from each other.
Cost Effective – this can vary as IT time spent doing capacity planning, negotiating and over-provisioning hardware is no longer required. Rather, a discipline of cloud cost management is required to ensure Pay-As-You-Go rates don’t eat up your budgets. Separate production from non-prod to contain costs and make use of reservations and tagging. If done correctly, you’ll actually have better cost understandings on a per application and business processes basis than you could with legacy tech.
So, the net result is, big or small, cloud can become THE best way to change your business for the better. And for IT, see “The Easiest Cloud Technologies for IT to Deploy”.