All businesses hope to remain viable and profitable in this technological age. Many businesses have been incorporating technology in their day-to-day operations to improve efficiency, aptly respond to market changes, and provide a superior customer experience. A business strives to be better than its competition. Incorporating internet solutions and a sound cloud strategy is a game-changer for most businesses.
For any company to do well, it should choose the right technology. The right technology allows the company to foster innovation, reduce daily operational costs, and improve agility. Recently, businesses are discovering that investing in the right cloud strategy is key to remaining relevant.
Many entrepreneurial platforms do struggle to identify an ideal internet and IT environment. Others are stuck with complex legacy architecture, while others pay for exorbitant cloud resources that may spiral out of control. Most businesses choose to run workloads in a hybrid cloud environment consisting of a public cloud and an on-premise system for optimal agility and cost-saving.
What is Cloud Computing?
Cloud computing provides on-demand computer services such as applications, storage, and processing power over the internet. These services are rendered on a subscription basis that a company would ideally pay for.
Cloud computing allows an enterprise to rent access to all computing services from a cloud service provider instead of investing in in-house data centres. Cloud computing allows an enterprise to avoid the cost and complexity associated with owning and maintaining IT infrastructure.
For any company considering cloud computing and cloud solutions, the enterprise can potentially benefit from a wide range of available services. Cloud solutions provide storage options for the business, data processing power and networking, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, and standard office applications.
Cloud computing is secure, affordable, improves enterprise efficiency, and is customizable to suit each specific and unique company need. Companies that have cloud solutions in place also have a lower risk of data loss, have a global presence, and the cloud allows them to seek the latest technologies and install them fast.
There are varieties of cloud services that any company seeking a cloud strategy should be aware of. This include:
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
An IaaS provider will offer a business configured software and hardware virtually using the internet to provide a virtual interface. An IaaS provider offers storage, servers, networking, and security features. An enterprise with an email hosting service provider may view that as an IaaS provider.
IaaS has applications in website hosting, testing and development, high-performance computing, and data backup and recovery. IaaS is a good option for businesses as it eliminates the intensive capital expenditure associated with on-site hardware or setting up data centres.
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
PaaS essentially provides a virtual platform for companies to thrive. It gives an environment allowing its users to create internet services and applications. The latter may be from simple applications to complex business applications that drive a business’s day-to-day operations.
PaaS providers will offer similar services as IaaS providers with the added advantage of an additional layer of middleware, database management, development tools, business intelligence services, and many other services. For this reason, PaaS is quite popular among web and software developers.
Many PaaS providers will offer their services on an as-needed basis allowing companies to only pay for the required services. These services are accessed using a secure internet connection. PaaS is advantageous as it reduces coding time while giving developers greater flexibility and adaptability with a sense of community. Developers can work on similar software while in different locations.
Software as a Service (SaaS)
An excellent example of a SaaS service is Microsoft Office 365 with its email, calendar, project tracking, web conferencing tools, and office tools. SaaS providers offer office solutions that enable the enterprise to be more efficient, systematic, and organized.
SaaS is applied in accounting and invoicing, tracking sales, monitoring the enterprise’s performance, overall office planning, and interoffice communication.
An enterprise will only pay for the services it requires. Therefore, it saves the burden of buying or managing each service independently.
Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)
As put in its name, DRaaS utilizes cloud solutions to protect and safeguard applications and data from loss or disruption. All companies run the risk of a data breach, data loss, and data disruption. Downtime in a business can cause significant damage to reputation and may dent a company’s profit margin.
Getting it back up and running in the shortest time is vital to ensure that data is not displaced when the system goes down.
So How Does A Business Select The Right Cloud Strategy?
Due to the numerous combinations of cloud services that can be incorporated into an enterprise, business owners should have a solid game plan before going into the process.
With the externalisation of more and more IT services, a proper choice of a cloud provider is vital for a business’s seamless growth and success. Therefore, company owners should:
Evaluate the Company’s Needs
Understanding the daily operations allows enterprise owners to come up with a cloud-first strategy. Since all businesses are unique, a cloud-first strategy allows the company to identify areas where all data can be moved from data centres to the cloud. Other enterprises may decide to move some data to the cloud while retaining other materials and data for improved efficiency.
Seek for The Most Agreeable Service Level Agreement (SLA)
Since different cloud strategy providers have varying SLAs, a company should look for an agreement that offers quality for the price. A company may want to bundle all services together with one provider allowing it to be more cost-effective.
Service providers must also offer optimum data security. As an enterprise, auditing compliance records and analysing the vulnerability of the service providers is critical.
Practice Workload Placement Analysis
Before entering into an SLA with any service provider, a company should do a workload placement analysis. Workload placement analysis will entail reassessing workloads regularly to evaluate whether the execution meets the organization’s needs.
The latter allows the company to effectively establish the pros and cons of moving the organization’s data from in-house data and information centres to the cloud.
Cloud computing and internet-based solutions are the future of enterprises. Therefore, enterprises should strive to be more adaptable to technological shifts to remain relevant.
A cloud strategy is a must-have for any enterprise wanting to remain successful and efficient in its operations. Call us today to get started on selecting the best cloud strategy for your company.
