JesseSo you’ve just been pulled into a meeting and someone on your team thought to themselves what a marvelous idea they had for improving the business by moving to the cloud and you decided to Google: “How do I convince my boss they're making a terrible IT decision?”
It’s a perfectly normal assessment, you wouldn’t be the first to suggest such radical thinking. There’s just something magically coercive when the upper echelon of management hears the word “cloud” and are then lured by its marketing charm like a lost sailor to the sounds of money-grubbing sirens.
Whether your ship has already set sail to the cloud or you’re just preparing to lift anchor at shore, here are a few rebuttals you can present to your boss, colleagues or just some schmuck off the streets. Let’s break down a few popular misunderstandings they will need before embracing “full speed ahead” onto this trending odyssey.
“Everyone and our competitors are going to the cloud! It makes sense!”
It does in fact make sense. According to the 2016 State of the Cloud report: this year’s growth for businesses planning to adopt to a cloud setting are trending upward with 29 percent of all SMBs by 2017 and by 51 percent by 2020.
Courtesy of BetterCloudBlog.com
However, statistics and invisible numbers aside, migrating to the cloud is not for the faint of heart. Either do it right or don’t do it at all. Just like every other popular trend out there, use at your own risk.
Moving to the cloud is actually a lot like signing up for LASIK eye surgery. If done correctly, you reap the benefits! If done poorly, then guess who has to live with it? The cloud can be a powerful vessel for taking your business to the next level, but if you don’t build it right, it’s going to cause leaks on your ship.
“A properly integrated cloud solution will give an immediate return on investment.”
In how long? Months or years immediately? This particular estimation is extremely give-or-take no matter how many ways you look at it. Not all cloud-based solutions are solutions to every problem.
There are many factors for what will be affected, including how much of an influence staff working times will improve, uptime differences for seasonal fluctuations or heavy site traffic days, hardware savings on server upgrades or replacements; everything that the cloud impacts on your business operations can be a tangible outcome.
The “immediate” ROI (return on investment) realistically will take some time to measure those actual savings depending on how much the cloud affects your business model. Luckily, cloud-based plans are a pay-as-you-use service and collected through monthly subscriptions, so there’s no real issue with affording the cloud, just time to know how much money you’re making off it.
“We’ll save a ton in costs with this great cloud provider (I just looked up)!”
Cost is more than just a price tag, it’s also time and effort for what you’ll be giving up in order to implement a cloud solution. Cost is always a major concern and we’re happy to tell you to look no further, but keep looking anyways. The cloud might bring with it a brevity of new possibilities and cheaper options as technology continues to advance. Just don’t get shortsighted from the cloud glamour if it’s not benefitting your business long-term.
Cloud providers typically offer fair competitive ranges in pricing options. With a vast amount of scalability to suit your business size and growth, this typically results in cost-effective investments. You can save upwards of thousands in capital expenses so you can budget to other areas of your business just by utilizing some of the benefits of cloud computing. These benefits that a cloud provider can bring to your business includes:
- Software licensing (a smorgasbord of a nightmare for IT folks, trust us).
- Ease of hardware/software integration (ever tried installing a program that worked on your Windows PC, or Linux but it didn’t work on your other computers? Yeah, cloud integration is about 100 times more difficult).
- Subscription-based pricing (mark your budget for cloud services as OpEx rather than capital for taxes).
- Gives more control to business users (able to easily manage and select your services instead of solely relying on IT).
- Hardware, bandwidth, cooling, and power maintenance can be left managed by cloud providers (leaving you free to concentrate on more important priorities).
These traits far outweigh the costs of keeping applications and services in traditional or legacy models, eventually creating more value and productivity to your business.
The best benefits cloud vendors can offer you is by letting you customize to your heart’s content. They should lend support to your business on the technical side and help minimize extra burdens you may or may not want for yourself such as managing all of the physical hardware powering your network so you can relax and let the IT people do the IT stuff.
Just be wary that your specific needs are effectively being met during consultation.
“We’ll cut costs with less pesky IT contractors!”
The landscape for IT has been in a constant state of flux because of the social impact that cloud computing has done for many businesses these days. You have to ask yourself how cloud providers, provide for you. What is it that you can gain from using the technology?
Even if you’re in the middle of migrating to a cloud infrastructure right now, you’re probably thinking where does my IT staff fit in this picture?
Traditionally, IT departments usually served within many business-owned data centers and maintained all their operations in a warm, cozy, and safe NOC (Network Operations Center). If any problems did occur, it was most likely only a few steps away for floor management to get to the direct source.
However, cloud adoption doesn’t mean throwing your IT staff overboard by cutting them loose once you migrate. It can free them up to concentrate on other important tasks like: security technology, application development, and business analytics. Cutting down on IT maintenance is always a factor for businesses when budgeting every year.
Nevertheless, having an on-site IT consultant (especially a systems administrator) is still vital for your business to continue functioning and to flourish for the future.
Bottom Line: It comes down to weighing where your business is at right now and where you see it going in the future.
There are many incentives that a cloud model will become a staple part of every business from here on out. It can take and transport your data safely and securely. Your communication network will be at its best potential. There’s no more downtime and you won’t lose out on any more customers or clients because of “error 404, page not found.”
Moving to the cloud, at its core, should come down to weighing your options. Make sure your business actually needs the cloud right here and now. By all means, embrace the cloud… if you need data integration in an online storage for staff to access anytime or if you need secured systems applications ready for employees to work away from the office or maybe you want to have an easier time managing the hardware infrastructure for your servers.
If for many reasons not, that’s perfectly fine. The “cloud” merely serves as a blueprint for setting a course into a future, morphing the current technology that’s available at the present. That future is one where everyone can feel like their working at 100%. When working more feels like working less because it’s just made life that much more easier. That is the true value of the cloud.
Whatever the outcome to go cloud or bust, here at Wowrack we wish the bold visionaries out there a safe and rewarding journey with the cloud. Good luck and bon voyage!
