In recent years, Digital Transformations, including Cloud migration has progressed beyond being the disruptive new kid on the tech block. Over the past 12 months, there has been a massive uptake in adoption of Cloud services among many local businesses and organisations. For startups and small and midsize businesses (SMBs), Cloud has emerged extremely advantageous and accessible for many companies who are looking to ‘punch above their weight’ when competing in the current COVID Climate. And do so with reduced personnel and financial resources. But it does not merely stop at cost reduction, Cloud adoption is at the heart of digital transformation, creating powerful collaboration within the business structure, addressing compliance challenges while joining up the dots between Office based and Remote working models.
With the complications created by COVID, a survey we carried out across our client base gave us insights into what they felt were the most important drivers of Cloud adoption and we’ve compiled them here:
1. Increasing business agility:
- Businesses that have adopted Cloud solutions have gained a competitive advantage by reducing complexity and increasing their readiness to respond to unpredictable market patterns.
- For Smaller companies, business agility, particularly during the last year, has been the main reason for moving to Cloud. They have observed improved agility and employee output due to on-demand access to data.
- The point is the same with rapid elasticity, which allows them to increase their Cloud infrastructure should they need to without painful network upgrades. The same applies if the business needs to downscale, only paying for what the business needs or uses.
- IT changes can be acquired and deployed at real pace.
2. Data Security:
-
Data is the life blood of any company, regardless of industry or size. The reassurance customer data is better prepared against external threats and ransomware attacks is a key driver in Cloud adoption.
-
In the event of a cyberattack, the solutions in place to protect your business – firewall, encryption, Disaster-recovery-as-a-Service – are far greater and more effective than solutions for on-site server protection.
- Microsoft invests about a billion each year on their Cloud security. Compare this to how much our clients were spending locally on server cybersecurity and factor in that they are now getting enterprise level security for a SMB and are now leveraging the expertise and cybersecurity of Microsoft’s in-house security teams.
-
Data can be backed up in the cloud as regularly as every 15-minute, minimising data loss in disaster situations. Small data set recovery time is lightyears ahead of server data recovery retrieval. Often, if a threat gets into a server, the data is irretrievable.
-
Backup and restore can be initiated from anywhere, using any computer, tablet, or smartphone.
-
Adopt a ‘Zero-Trust’ model and give access to only the resources employees need to perform their duties with greater security administrative controls that we have set-up for and trained our clients in.
3. Reducing cost:
- A big driver behind Cloud adoption. Superficially, Cloud may appear more costly ‘on the tin’ but in comparison to maintaining a legacy on-premise system over a set period of time, it is far the cheaper option in the medium to long term, which is the point many of our clients are only just beginning to understand.
- Most have found that the cost of migrating to the cloud is actually much lower than the license renewal of their legacy apps and systems.
- For SMBs especially, this leads to a very healthy return on investment after year one. Cloud computing enables organisations to reduce cost through server consolidation, thin clients and community cost sharing.
- There is also the hidden cost of compliance and risk management. Fail to safeguard your customer data and you leave yourself open to costly fines and lawsuits. You can no longer afford to adopt the ‘we can’t afford it’ mentality – if you can’t afford the fine then you need to look at cybersecurity solutions.
4. Supporting an optimised, mobile workforce:
- Whether you’re for or against it, employees want the option to remain, and you may as well continue to offer a ‘flexible’ option to attract the top talent and Cloud is the easiest way to do this. Work from any place, any time, on any device.
- Recently, the smart mobile market has matured and has been a key technology behind the acceptance of Cloud. It was the smartphone that Cloud first gained mainstream traction.
- Going forward, more and more vendors are expected to join the race to launch new competing Cloud computing solutions, we continue to monitor and rate each offering to keep our clients in the know.
5. Improving productivity:
- Use of Cloud-based tools for email, instant messaging, voice communication, information sharing, and development, event scheduling, and conferencing really put Cloud in a league of its own in real-time collaboration on working documents (across sites and location).
- Visible footprint of document version history and instant access to a company’s database (for approved personnel), again, across sites and location.
6. Staying a head of the competition:
- New tools allow smaller businesses to streamline workflows and improve processes. This trend to automate business processes will continue to grow, and we have advised many clients on the best way to build this.
- Automation leads to a reduction in operational costs and faster response times to meet customer demands.
The drivers discussed above will impact businesses at different levels. Although there are security concerns associated with Cloud adoption for some organisations, the rapid adoption of enterprise-class Cloud solutions and strategy shows that the concerns are being met presently. Hybrid solutions are allowing larger, industry specific organisations steer efficiencies towards Cloud migration with no impact on security or compliance. Any organisation will benefit largely from Cloud adoption if it is considered, planned, and implemented strategically.
Learn more about how KBS can help your business build resilience, lower costs and improve productivity. Talk to one of our experts today.