Three considerations when adopting a successful cloud solution
It’s all too easy for a business to jump on the cloud ‘bandwagon’, run ahead and start building a solution because it feels like the right thing to do, or because it’s what competitors have done and you don’t want to be left behind. The reality is that building a successful cloud service means taking a step back and planning carefully.
To help with planning a successful cloud implementation there are several considerations for businesses before starting. If you’re heading the technical team tasked with getting your cloud service running, try to ensure the business has considered these as it will reduce the amount of re-work you’ll have to do!
These are:
What are our goals?
Take the time to think about and clearly define what the end goals are. The first questions to ask on the way to doing this are:
- What are the customer needs driving the service?
- What is the competitive landscape?
- How will you measure success?
These questions will not only help business direction, but will also allow organisations the time to think about and clearly define what their objectives are and establish a realistic launch deadline. Over-complicating any one of these will only add to the time it takes to launch a new service and ultimately, cost money.
What processes are affected?
The biggest barrier to cloud is nothing to do with technology, it is the existing processes that are geared around the legacy way of doing business.
Ultimately, with legacy processes likely to cause disruption to an organisations newly adopted cloud solution, a cloud management solution is vital, especially one that has the flexibility to integrate the cloud with processes.
Choosing the right service for your business
There’s a plethora of cloud computing solutions to choose from, so much so that finding the right cloud services for your business can seem totally bewildering. Aside from the obvious matching cloud services to your business needs, any business considering a cloud service provider should look for the following:
- Trust – it’s an incredibly important and close-working relationship, so fully understanding your cloud service provider (CSP), its principles and its proven history is key to successful cloud adoption.
- Customer support – technical support should be available to you online or by phone all day, every day, wherever your CSP may be based in the world
- Scalability – business growth inevitably means your cloud computing needs to grow too. Can your CSP scale to accommodate your growing business? How easily can this be done and at what cost? Also, if your staff numbers increase, can you easily add additional numbers to the account?
- Technical expertise – your CSP must understand your business objectives and be able to match that with its technical expertise. Engaging a CSP who has a strong understanding of your vertical market can help
Deploying a cloud service can be a huge commitment, both financially and in terms of resources. Despite this, this is the future for storing information and something organisations need to get on board with. If providers looking to adopt a cloud solution take the above into consideration and stick to their guns in terms of needs and wants from possible solutions, a successful cloud deployment is attainable.
To find out more and check out our Case Studies of successful cloud deployments.