3 Reasons For Your Enterprise To Be On The Cloud

Cloud is one of the big buzzwords that everyone is throwing around now. While we may be quite a stretch away from everyone and everything being on the cloud and running optimally, we are definitely getting there sooner than later. So when I set out to talk to people who run enterprises about the move to cloud, they wanted really good reasons to initiate the move that were sensible from a business standpoint. Here are three top ones that I could think of

Successful companies are able to innovate quickly, are agile, listen to their customers and provide the best possible digital experience. Those that adapt quickly to the digital world are 26% more profitable than their industry peers, according to research by MIT Sloan.

As an enterprise today, the emphasis really is on how nimble, fast and agile you are. We are living in an age where competitors come out with better solutions for a problem at breakneck speed while you are in the middle of a development cycle for the first iteration of your solution. The big data guzzling and people powered social media platforms are your next challenge, if there is even a minor delay from your end in solving anything, it gets multiplied exponentially on social media and many a times social media is where your next prospect is waiting to get converted. Today’s fast paced and frantic lifestyle also makes enterprise and solution security one of the topmost priorities. And given the skill and proficiency of hackers today, staying abreast of security updates is the difference between succeeding and failing miserably. In 2015, IBM estimated that 2.5 quintillion new bytes of data were generated each day. As more devices and applications are put into the hands of an increasing number of users, organizations need a high-performance, secure, and cost-effective platform to properly manage their data. With all this in mind, let us get into the topic. Here are three simple yet important reasons that are in favor of moving to the cloud.

Global Reach and Availability

This is the first thing that your enterprise should consider as a good reason to move to the cloud. Availability across the globe is no longer a problem that you have to grapple with. You will not be restricted or bound by where your data center is located when you are trying to cater to a global audience with your product or solutions. All of today’s top cloud providers will guarantee that availability and latency will not be an issue for you on any corner of the globe. This will effectively ease a lot of enterprise overheads that otherwise go into building redundancies and clusters that ensure the same thing. The other hidden benefit here is the fact that you need not worry about IT support staffing to ensure availability and response times. The minute you decide to go on the cloud, you are global and available. For today’s nimble enterprise, this is a great plus. In Fact, you are expected to be global in today’s landscape by default.

Elastic IT Infrastructure

In the old world, IT Infrastructure was a major capex guzzler. Whenever your enterprise is trying to grow or cater to a wider audience, there was a cycle that began with a time and money consuming IT infra update that was needed. Then when the actual update to infra is happening, more often than not, we realize that there is a gap between hardware and software in terms of being able to deliver performance, we then set out to rectify that. Sometimes the infra update comes with the need to add skilled resources who are not easily available and come at a premium cost. With the cloud, what you get yourself is an elastic data center that can grow whenever you need it to and sometimes even shrink whenever you need that. This frees up a lot of time cycles and funds that are always better spent trying to solve the core problem that your product or service is about. The issue of skilled resources also gets factored out of the equation and all the cloud vendors charge you only for what you are using, hence improving your capex utilization to better and optimal levels.

Improved and Efficient Security

One of the most important aspects that any enterprise team has to be on top of is security. The recent Wannacry ransomware outbreak is an example of what can go wrong if you don’t have everything secured and updated regularly. When you have a multi-platform or multi-vendor scenario, this gets even more dicey and cagey to manage. The traditional on premise IT structures had a dedicated team that was tracking, analyzing and scheduling regular and sometimes ad-hoc updates to improve security and sometimes between the time an update arrives and the time it is applied is when the enterprise is the most vulnerable. Also the need for smart self-defending networks that can understand and evolve with the evolving threat ecosystem are the order of the day. When you are on the cloud, your cloud provider ensures and guarantees that you get the latest and greatest and importantly the most secure versions of everything that you are working with. Given their position in the enterprise ecosystem, the cloud service providers are able to also give you top of the line hardware and application level security. Like I mentioned earlier, this used to be one of the challenges that traditional IT teams were constantly grappling with. There have been instances where an update was rolled out and while the roll-out was in progress, a new update came out, making it an infinite loop or a gift that keeps giving.

So there are the three simple yet compelling reasons that i can give you for moving your enterprise to the cloud. There are some who will say that these functions of the size of an enterprise and should not be generalized as such. I agree that nothing is hard and fast, but we are standing in a world where by 2020 we are going to see about 67% of all enterprises on the cloud according to studies and in my opinion, the move to the cloud is more a question of when and less a question of why now.

Let me know what you think.