Justifying Cloud

TOP 10 strategies for justifying cloud to your business

1. Move away from capital expenditure to operational expense.
   Large upfront capital expenditure is a common requirement with traditional on premise IT infrastructure. With Cloud, instead of upfront purchases of server hardware and software you move into a predictable ‘pay for what you use’ utility-based monthly expense.
2. Applications that can talk to each other and integrate - no more silos.
   Cloud-based applications allow to be extended upon and integrate with each other through published API access. Integration between different Cloud applications offers new opportunities for streamlining your business processes and removes the need for data re-entry.
3. Overall savings in costs with economies of scale and better efficiency.
   There are many reasons why the Cloud is cheaper. The most obvious of them is that the large Cloud providers are able to benefit from huge economies of scale and thus be able to offer more computing power at a lower cost. There are many other reasons such as paying for only what you use, being able to scale resources up or down as and when required.
4. Scale up or down easily and on demand.
   One of the biggest challenges facing large organisations is how to cope with peaks and troughs of demand and even getting the capacity planning right from the outset to meet future growth. Aside from the cost there are often technical limitations or challenges to easily scale systems without interruption with traditional infrastructure. Cloud simplifies this.
5. Mobile device ready.
   Today, in modern organisations, employees are accessing Company data from a variety of devices and from a variety of locations. This flexibility is made easier by the use of Cloud services and makes the mobile device experience better.
6. Speed of delivery.
   With traditional systems, the time taken to commission, implement and configure services is generally measured in weeks or months. With Cloud-delivered services a Company could get services up and running within a matter of hours.
7. Giving the control back to the users.
   One of the most significant trends brought on by the growing popularity of mobile devices is the ‘Bring your own device’ model within organisations. Combined with Cloud services the traditional model of IT department driven decision making is moving towards user and business driven needs first.
8. Data driven intelligence.
   With Cloud-based applications and services, it is easier than ever to pull together different strands of data, from multiple sources, and perform advanced analytics and reporting in real-time.
9. Easier system upgrades and patches with less hassles.
   Maintaining up to date software is one of the biggest headaches faced by the IT department. With Cloud systems, ongoing upgrades are performed automatically as part of the normal service delivery and done on a regular basis behind the scenes with little or no interruption.
10. High level of security.
    When Cloud Computing first started, one of the biggest areas of concern was security. People are realising that fear was misguided and that well-run cloud providers offer higher levels of security than they can with on-premise infrastructure themselves.