Why Cloud?

For businesses, the barrier to success is often not the lack of creative ideas, but rather the enterprise’s ability to execute and bring them to market. IT-led innovation poses a whole new set of technical challenges like Agile data management and storing & processing of Big data. All this can be done effectively and efficiently over the cloud, thereby giving companies greater room to deploy innovation initiatives quickly. It can help IT teams within the companies to foster creativity, agility and innovation.

If the philosophy of JIT (Just-in-time) is continuous improvement in which non-value-adding activities (or wastes) are identified and removed for the purposes of: Reducing Cost, Improving Quality, Improving Performance, Improving Delivery, Adding Flexibility, Increase innovativeness, then cloud adoption does exactly that to your organization’s IT related works. And who would not want that?

The cloud is the future of computing

IBM’s Center for Applied Insights collaborated with Oxford Economics to survey 802 cloud decision makers and users, creating the report Under Cloud Cover: How Leaders are Accelerating Competitive Differentiation. According to the 2013 report, ‘More and more business leaders are recognizing the cloud’s profound implications for how enterprises can make money, differentiate, and compete.’

According to Bitglass, in its second annual Cloud Adoption Report (which is a global report compiled through an automated, cloud-based analysis of real-world traffic data from 113,000 organizations and more than 20 industry verticals, including finance, healthcare, education and government), overall, cloud application adoption across all industries increased more than 71 percent in 2015.

According to Gartner, cloud adoption is accelerating at an enormous rate. Based on their forecast for 2011-2017, Gartner expects adoption to hit $250 billion by 2017.

How MSPs can help boost efficiency?

Now, with the emergence of cloud-based third-party services that cut costs and improve efficiency, they offer parallel opportunities that can ultimately have a transformative impact on a company’s process of innovation.

A Managed Service Provider (MSP) can help

  • Clients grow faster by allowing them to focus on their core areas
  • Their clients enjoy higher computing power with effective information transfer
  • Their partners access their enterprise data and manage it from anywhere around the globe
  • Scale up or scale down of computing capacity within minutes, depending on individual needs
  • Ensure multiple layers of security so that safety and integrity of data, application and IP is never compromised
  • Allow these firms the use of sophisticated IT resources without having to invest in CapEx
  • Sustain new entrants to the IT world since Cloud computing is extremely supportive to startups, offering very high levels of scalability

MSPs can provide either/all of cloud service models like:

  • IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service where players like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Rackspace provide a backbone that can be used by other companies)
  • PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service where a business can create its own custom applications for use by all in the company)
  • SaaS (Software-as-a-Service where the business subscribes to an application it accesses over the Internet, like Salesforce.com)

Service models above are provided over the deployment models like Private Cloud, Public Cloud and Hybrid cloud. These help organizations to choose which hosting solution for what all applications, thereby helping the client to migrate from the traditional or existing data centers to the cloud, doing it in a cost effective way.

MSPs are well aware of how the Cloud works, and advantages Cloud provides businesses.

There are also several ‘born in the cloud’ firms, purely dedicated to cloud services.
Example: CloudGarage (started in 2013 and part of both the Amazon Web Services as well as the Azure Partner Network) is one such start-up dedicated to providing customized cloud solutions to all kinds of businesses, be it a large enterprise, an SME or a startup.

Data safety in cloud

The fact of the matter is: mainly, data breaches occur not because of where data is stored, but because of insufficient security policies, procedures and processes. The wrong employee having admin access to an organization’s system could be enough to bring it down. Not to mention the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) trend catching on in organizations. Also, did you know that 93% of DPA (Data Protection Act) breaches are caused by human error. [Courtesy: Continuum Managed Services, LLC]

With the right Cloud Service Provider partnership, safety will no longer be an impediment to cloud adoption. According to Nat Kausik, CEO of Bitglass, “The emergence of third-party security services from cloud access security brokers is helping to fill cloud security gaps and to make public cloud a reality for all industries.”

So, if Technology has shrunk the world, especially post World War 2, then Cloud just opened up a new world of possibilities for businesses in this shrunken world of ours!!

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Posted in IT Infrastructure Transformation