Is Your Business Ready for The Cloud?

Here’s a tech prediction we don’t need a crystal ball to make: sooner rather than later, most organizations will move most of their IT to the Cloud! The cloud is hot topic these days. The vast majority of software vendors are moving away from server-based products and becoming software-as-a-service providers because operating on premise is no longer enough in today’s dynamic business environment where customers expect faster, more streamlined services. Every day, everywhere, businesses are gravitating to cloud-based models as they provide a radically new way of delivering, consuming and adopting IT services in a far more agile, efficient, and cost-effective manner. In not too distant past, developing a cloud adoption strategy was a matter of choice for small business community, but not anymore.

Here are a few reasons to expect cloud solutions gain more traction in the coming year and why small businesses should evaluate cloud not just as another utility but as a new way to gain a competitive advantage:

Cost reduction: Cost is a key consideration for many small businesses when making an investment decision. As cloud technology matures, forward-looking business owners are turning to it to generate cost savings through reduction in spending on equipment, infrastructure, maintenance and software. With subscription costs going down every day, 65% of business leaders consider cost savings as the top reason why their enterprises choose to adopt the cloud.

Consuming technology without IT: Moving to the cloud is one way companies have been able to free IT staff from routine maintenance to focus on more strategic projects. With the cloud, IT resources including software, storage, networking, virtual machinery, and applications, are available as utilities that businesses only pay for as and when they use them.

Fast time to value: The goal of any business is to improve Time to Value (TtV) – the time between a business request and the initial delivery of that request – in order to realize some level of business value as quickly as possible. The cloud offers the quickest way to deliver on business requests, thus helping customers to realize much faster Time to Value.

Opex vs Capex: Going Capex-free means businesses can leverage new equipment, capabilities, and software as an operating expense (OpEx) rather than spending to acquire and maintain assets. This type of approach allows businesses to invest more into their core assets for business growth while easily catering for that growth through scalable consumption of cloud services.

Customer Experience: Even in the Cloud, the customer is still king. More than any time in the past, customers today expect services to be available anywhere, anytime they need them, hence their preference for agility and flexibility of the cloud over traditional technology ownership model. Up to 71% of the over 1000 business leaders surveyed by IBM globally said that cloud has influenced the customer experience. As well as delivering frictionless customer experiences, the cloud enables enterprises to quickly develop, deploy and update new products and services tailored to their customers’ preferences.

At OC IT Solutions, we can help you choose the right cloud provider for your data storage or backup services as well as line of business applications. Contact us for more information or to schedule a free consultation.