There are many reasons that people move to the cloud. Some go there for valid business reasons, some want to save money and more than a few head there because “everyone is doing it.” To have success in the cloud, however, the logic behind a move to the cloud has to be sound. Here are five top drivers according to a report from Accenture.
Business Growth
Few are the businesses where IT doesn’t play a major part in expansion plans. Whether it is deploying mobile devices, new CRM tools or customised business applications, most organisations include IT as a central element of business strategy. The cloud may be a simpler way to realise those goals.
Efficiency
Accenture sees efficiency as a way to streamline processes to enable more work to be done in less time or with fewer resources than before. The goal might be to heighten growth, reduce costs, enter new markets or improve transaction times. But whatever the driver, efficiency is a big reason why people move to the cloud.
Improved User Experience
Few customers have the patience to wait more than a few seconds for a webpage to appear or an online transaction to be processed. Yet many organisations struggle to meet user expectations. They are cobbled by antiquated back end systems or a lack of integration. As a result, both internal and external users are left hanging while the system takes half an eternity to serve up the desired information. Augmenting the existing IT infrastructure with cloud assets can be a faster way to improve the overall user experience.
Agility
The problem with internal IT departments is that they often lack flexibility. Having evolved over many years, they consist of both new and old elements, as well as multiple, disparate platforms. With budgets tight, many are forced to cope with a non-optimum infrastructure that hampers them in terms of business agility. Adding cloud elements strategically can add greater agility to the organisation and make it easier to respond promptly to market shifts.
Cost
Cost is cited as one of the major reasons to move to the cloud. But a focus on cost gives many organisations too limited a view on the value of the cloud. That leads them to only look at the cloud as a medium for cheap bulk storage or a place to offload non-core functions. Certainly, those can be worthwhile reasons for some. But the cloud can also bring about positive gain in terms of greater productivity, boosted revenues and competitive advantage.
Regardless of the reason you wish to move to the cloud – business growth, agility, cost, improved user experience or efficiency – Ballard Chalmers has long experience in bespoke cloud migration, development and integration. We build cloud applications that are secure, reliable, affordable, feature rich, scalable and exactly tailored to your environment.
For more information call 01342 410223.
By Drew Robb, Contributor
Drew Robb is a freelance editor and writer, specialising in the Information Technology sector.
