Cloud Strategy For Your Business

The cloud technology is constantly evolving, however innovative and agile cloud solutions can help businesses of any size to gain a competitive edge in their industry. Cloud can be put to work for enterprises, and anyone from new tech startups to urban and small-town mom and pop shops can benefit greatly. Migrating your company’s IT infrastructure to the cloud can be a risky task, but as technology and the IT industry evolve, it may be a task that can’t be put off forever. However, lacking a well-defined cloud strategy can delay your company’s transition to the cloud or put a stop to it altogether.

Choosing a cloud solution can be best for your business due to the following reasons:

• Cost Efficient- You can save on the upfront cost of upgrading and managing your IT infrastructure when you use cloud services. This will further help in reducing the cost as the capital expenses are going to be converted to operational expenses. As they are various plans available like one-time-payment, ‘pay as you go’ model and other customized packages, organizations can significantly lower their IT costs.
• Storage Space–  As all the data will get stored in the remote cloud servers, organizations will not require space for file storage and other software programs. Cloud not only frees up the in-house space but also provides unlimited space.
• Scalability– As businesses grow over a period of time, cloud services can help in expanding the resources. For start-ups and growing enterprises, being able to optimize resources from the cloud enables them to escape the large one-off payments of hardware and software, making operational costs minimal.
• Drives profitability– Due to cloud migration, employees can focus on their core task of monitoring the infrastructure and improving the workflow. This will further help processes to be more efficient. Thus cloud computing leads to drive profitability.
• Resilient to faults– When you are using your own servers, you need to invest in hardware and make sure you duplicate everything as you need to keep data safe. When you use cloud technology, redundancy and susceptibility to outages are eliminated. Hence it adds on to reliability to the systems and keeps the data secured & easily available.

To make full use of the cloud computing arena, one needs to have a strong cloud strategy in place. One that works for the business as a whole, and also one that works for the employee’s benefits. Here are some cloud computing strategies that a business should keep in mind.

  Choosing the cloud type– Important decision is whether to choose from the public, private or hybrid cloud for your business. A private cloud is secure and robust but costs more. A public cloud is lean and relatively cost-less but comes with security concerns. A hybrid cloud needs expert developers’ help for careful planning to deploy, which increases operating costs. While choosing the cloud, pros & cons of each type need to be considered.

 Decide your budget– Based on your requirements, choose suitable cloud type as your IT support backbone. Eg. If you choose public/hybrid cloud for your business, there might be a low investment in the storage hardware, but you might have to invest much more in hiring correct people for cloud development. This will impact your budget.

 Service Providers– Once you have finalized the budget and type of cloud, next is to choose from the many cloud service providers available in the market. A lot of them would provide additional features like social media integration and higher security measures, which might be valuable to you, so choose wisely. Disaster recovery, backup etc. are some additional benefits which some of the cloud providers have for organization’s benefit.

There are many ways to utilize cloud technology and each one of those can have its own considerations. Aligning those best practices with your business goals is the key strategy that should be followed. As illustrated by some of the benefits I’ve outlined above, cloud technology has the capability not just to improve IT infrastructure of the organization, but also help to collaborate efficiently within organizational teams and their clients.