Moving to Cloud Applications in Mid-Market Companies

Implementing cloud applications is supposed to help Mid-Market companies to achieve many strategic objectives.?According to Marian Carcary and others (Carcary, 2014), cost optimization is one of the primary objectives for moving to the cloud.

Petra Maresova and Vladimir Sobeslave indicated in their article “Cost–benefit analysis – evaluation model of cloud computing deployment for use in companies” that moving to cloud should enable companies to transition to OPEX-oriented cost model rather than CAPEX-oriented model. Cloud model offers pay-as-you use billing model which will result into better utilization of the IT resources. (Maresova, 2017).

Cloud computing has also contributed to increase organizations flexibility and scalability to expand into new markets relying on cloud platforms scalability and reliability. (Al-Azzawi, 2021).

?Mobility was another great benefit for transitioning to cloud computing during the pandemic period.?Employees managed to access business applications and perform their jobs.?It has also enabled companies’ executive management to access companies’ dashboards and make timely decisions to ensure survival and growth (Picoto, 2021).

?According to the article “Business continuity management in data center environments”, Holmes E. Miller and Kurt J., indicated that cloud computing has provided extra measures to ensure better business continuity leveraging distributed cloud providers data centers and tested disaster recovery strategy (Miller, 2022).?Companies move the cloud, has been supported with the legally binding Service Level Agreements (SLAs) backed up by cloud providers to secure applications availability and performance (Rajnikant, 2021).

?Security was one of the key dimensions considered by companies to move to the cloud.?Karthik Ramachandran and David Linthicum from Deloitte (Linthicum, 2020) indicated that the main reason behind moving to cloud for IT executives is the nature of cyber-attacks which became very sophisticated.?With the huge investment, cloud providers managed to deploy more secured environments against cyber-attacks, minimizing the burden on organizations to retain cyber security specialized and scarce resources (Muheidat, 2021).

?Another great benefit for moving to the cloud is that cloud is boosting companies’ innovation culture.?According to Li, Z., Wang, and other authors in their article “Exploitative or explorative innovation? An event study of cloud computing business value”, companies can leverage the huge Research and Development (R&D) funds invested by the cloud providers, to bring the latest innovation to the business. This also has supported them to avoid the costly on-premise application upgrade which turns to be a re-implementation to maintain the technology up-to-date?(Li, 2021).

?Some Mid-Market industry segments like Engineering and Construction (E&C) industry is processing huge and heterogenous amounts of data that is stored in desperate systems, which contributed to expedite the transition to the cloud in this industry (Oke, 2021). Transitioning to the cloud is supposed to play a pivotal role in increasing those companies agility (Beach, 2013), and contributed to increase the collaboration between the scattered project teams, optimize technology costs and scale up capabilities to process the huge volume of projects data (Bello, 2021).?

?Cloud computing technology helped Mid-Market companies of different sizes to avail higher storage and network capacity, better processing power and agility without higher CAPEX investment need.?It has also enhanced scalability of organizations to expand in new markets and regions and introduced a favorable impact on reducing capital IT expenditure, hardware, maintenance, and support costs optimization (Cleary, 2016).

?Moreover, moving to the cloud has increased IT capabilities to offer solid Service Level Agreements (SLAs) supported with back-to-back binding SLAs offered by technology providers.?This has paved the way to allow organizations to offer higher SLAs to their customers, employees, and suppliers (Lynn, 2018).

?Tyrone Padayachee, Digital design manager at Richard Crooks Constructions (the Australian family-owned construction company), indicated that the migrating to the cloud enabled Richard Crooks Constructions to have better visualization over the design and coordination over the different types of projects.?He mentioned that the cloud computing enhanced company automation levels, optimized cycle times and enhanced project profitability margins?(Oracle, 2021).

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