Let’s assume you have some guests visiting for two weeks. Now, do you buy a car for them to move around? And when they leave, what happens to this car? Does it have to sit around until the next time someone comes around? Logically, you would just rent a car for your visitors to use for the time they are with you, isn’t it?
Cloud services align well with this rental car analogy. The cloud is here, and it is here to stay. However, the conversation around the cost of cloud adoption and cloud operations being a not-so-cheap proposition continues to make its rounds.
Maybe it is time to turn this cost conversation off because the cloud has never really been just about the cost. It’s about convenience and optionality. It is about changing your CAPEX/OPEX mix in favor of OPEX. There are certain initial costs associated with cloud adoption (as with any technology), you should move to the cloud anyway. Here are our arguments
Operational readiness
Digitalization is the reality of today as software eats the world. In the enterprise environment, this easily translates to loathsome operational headaches in the absence of the cloud. You need to manage your server updates and upgrades, and you need to ensure the latest versions and security patches are in place. The management of hardware and software becomes the responsibility of a dedicated IT team. You also have to make data recuperation and recovery plans in case of disaster.
Doesn’t that look like a long laundry list of things to do only from the operational aspects? So how does the cloud help here?
- Your cloud service provider manages all server updates, upgrades, and maintenance releasing your business of these issues and associated costs.
- You don’t need a dedicated team to manage your servers, freeing up your IT resources.
- You don’t need to worry about disaster recovery since your service provider takes care of these issues efficiently and proactively
- Cloud helps you with loss prevention that can occur from malware, viruses, age-related hardware deterioration, or simple user error. Since data is not stored locally, it remains accessible even if your laptops or PCs are damaged and helps business continuity.
Cost-savings
The hardware utilization of most enterprises is usually well below 20%, primarily because they need the excess capacity to handle demand peaks. It is not uncommon for many enterprises to carry almost five times the required hardware, networking, and data center space. Utilization rates can further go down to 10% outside of peak demands.
The cloud strategy shines here because –
- Low CAPEX investment since there are no space, equipment, facilities, or software costs associated with the cloud
- You don’t have to allocate resources to manage your data center and maintain everything.
- You reduce your operational costs and costs associated with DR, DC, and backup.
- No prohibitive upfront costs and no need for long-term investments
- Reduced dependency on IT administrative services decreases IT spending.
- Lower energy costs as you manage to eliminate or significantly reduce the energy bills that emerge from server power consumption and, hence, reduce your operating costs.
Scalability
No two organizations have the same IT needs. A large organization’s needs will differ from the IT needs of say, a startup. We must consider fluctuating workloads and business demands that seem to have become a norm in today’s dynamic business environment.
With the cloud, you can manage your organizational scalability needs easily. The cloud enables vertical, horizontal, and dynamic scaling to accommodate your business demands without investing in physical infrastructure. You can provision more or reduce your resource requirements and computing power according to the need of the hour rather than having to do very conservative demand sizing and over-allocate hardware.
The cloud brings a great deal of agility to your organization. It has a positive impact on overall workplace productivity as you don’t have IT administrators scrambling to provide room to a new user, accommodate infrastructure needs in case of increased demand, or worry about wasting space on an idle server.
Improve modernization opportunities
With change being a constant in today’s economy, businesses must constantly evolve to meet shifting market demands and customer needs. The cloud enables organizations to reshape their infrastructure, accommodate workloads, and change processes to meet present-day needs.
That said, many enterprise applications are legacy applications, and need constant updates and upgrades to remain relevant. There are new regulations to follow (such as the GDPR amongst others), technology changes to adhere to, and customer demands to accommodate. Modernizing such an application in its entirety might not be feasible as it could be time-consuming and not financially viable. However, building these new features, updates, and upgrades in line with what the cloud needs helps the applications become cloud-ready for the future.
Early access to cutting-edge software and hardware
Today you might feel that your business does not need futuristic technologies such as AI and Machine Learning. Today, you might not need an IoT business application or an application that needs GPU to be at its core. However, given the rapidly evolving business and technology landscape and evolving customer demands, how can you be sure you won’t need them tomorrow?
Fast computing sits at the heart of these futuristic technologies. But these futuristic technologies are fast gaining ground in the enterprise today. What happens when you want to leverage technology, such as AI to improve your customer experience initiatives? What if you need to implement Machine Learning to hone and improve your processes? What if you need an IoT application to meet the needs of your business?
These technologies demand greater processing power and have different hardware considerations. In the absence of the cloud, you’d have to make these investments. You’d also have to look into the implementation, which could be time and resource-intensive. With the cloud, you can access unprecedented computing and processing power and leverage optimized hardware for such technologies without worrying about the implementations.
Hassle-free DevOps adoption
In the wake of digital transformation, DevOps and Cloud have developed a symbiotic relationship to help businesses achieve their transformation goals. The aesthetics of cloud technologies complement DevOps processes and assist in increasing developer productivity and efficiency. Since developers have control over their components, wait times reduce significantly. Using the cloud, developers can easily automate the process of building, provisioning, and managing the code. It helps the service team accelerate the development process, ensure repeatability, and reduce instances of human error significantly.
By leveraging self-service methods to provision infrastructure using the cloud infrastructure, developers can try new things, fail fast, and get robust products and services into the market faster. And they do all this without any new infrastructure or investment demands!
While we do agree that moving to the cloud will demand an initial investment, the kind of agility your business gets with this move is hard to ignore.
Agility is an essential business need as markets become more disruptive than ever before, and poorly planned IT infrastructures prove to be fragile and limit business growth. So, while agility could be touted as the undervalued benefit of the cloud, it provides a strategic advantage…one that significantly increases the chances of your business’s long-term survival.
If you want to know more about how the cloud can add value to your organization: reach us at contact@wissen.com.
