What Cloud Services Hold the Greatest Value for Irish Organisations?
Most organisations, ultimately, want to do business easier: to sell more and to scale. The IT industry talks about cloud services like email and messaging, or websites and e-commerce, and thinks in terms of Office 365 or the Google Apps suite. Customers talk about business-driven imperatives like improving productivity, enabling collaboration, or getting faster access to information.
We know this because we surveyed our customers about what services would benefit from being migrated to a cloud platform, and what were the biggest business benefits of doing so. At 26.5% and 25.3% respectively, email and websites were the top candidates for cloud migration. Some 22% of our customers said moving IT infrastructure to the cloud would deliver business benefits. In our experience, as customers understand the general value of cloud, they then begin looking at how they manage and mine information. CRM is a classic example of this, and was next in our survey (16%).
Our customers listed the four biggest business benefits from cloud as access, scalability, performance and speed. Interestingly, cost savings were well down the priority list. Cloud’s real value is in helping customers to focus on innovating in their business. Cloud also offers the flexibility and range of services that allows organisations to build a technology infrastructure that’s as unique as their business. The key is to research the market, understand their own environment and choose the workloads that are right for their specific organisations first.
At SureSkills, we encourage customers to first take a step back, evaluate what to move, and to conduct proofs of concept. Considering the end destination – in other words, where the value is focused on their business – is the surest way to plot a successful route on their cloud journey.
The Next Steps
The first step on your journey to the cloud is to evaluate the benefits for your business, then plan your route. Understanding which vendor(s) is the right fit for your organisation can be a complicated endeavour, and as the only authorised Training & Consulting partner of AWS, Microsoft & VMware, SureSkills are uniquely placed to help you take an agnostic, strategic approach to your Cloud Adoption, whether it be Public, Private or Hybrid.
Cloud has several advantages but understanding the benefits in the context of your business is key. Through our ‘Business Value Assessment’ we will help you to assess each vendor’s value proposition as it relates to your business. Then to take a step back and design your execution strategy, ensuring all things are considered, whilst been focused on your end goal. We will be there to support you as you make the journey. Through this single point of contact we reduce complexity to integrate your full Cloud lifecycle, including Licensing into one easy monthly billing & credit terms.
To gain a detailed understanding of these steps and discover what benefits cloud can have on your business, come and join us at our upcoming event, "Cloud & Your Business: Make the Right Choice" on October 27th in Croke Park.
This event is for business people evaluating moving to cloud and want to understand what considerations need to be taken, as well as the changes cloud adoption will have on their organisation. This will NOT be a highly technical event, but with that said it will be beneficial for IT people to understand where the business is coming from and how the traditional role of an IT person will change in this imminent 'World of Cloud'.