The cloud has grown from a concept since 1963 into an on-demand service put into use by Amazon for its web-based retail services in the early 2000’s, followed by quickly being commoditized. Why is it then that a lot of enterprises are just now looking into the cloud to help them manage their compute? While it seems many organizations took advantage of the many benefits offer, just as many are now pivoting environment and realizing that the cloud offers flexibility while still being able to leverage control, collaboration while still applying process and good practices, and most importantly, the ability to adapt to market demands quickly in this ever changing environment.
Almost overnight we witnessed the move of the workforce from an office to their homes for safety and social distancing reasons. The old way of doing business was put to the test and quickly found wanting. Technologies that we hadn’t used, or for many hadn’t even heard of, became overnight necessities in this new business environment, like Zoom for conferencing and Client Management tools for managing remote laptops and desktops. Old technologies were quickly seen as a dividing line between a company being labelled as essential or non-essential.
Many in-person activities were able to be moved to a virtual scenario, for instance many law firms now advertise that new clients can conduct everything from initial interviews to final settlement of their injury cases on-line. A majority of these firms are leveraging SaaS solutions to handle a previously manual driven workload that required someone to take the initial statements and information in-person. Now that these businesses have digitized, they are realizing not only time-savings but being able to align their human resources to more important and vital work.
The question now isn’t “should we migrate to the cloud?”, but more appropriately “what could we migrate to the cloud?” The tangible advantages of migrating to the cloud are readily apparent:
- Increased collaboration, especially amongst dispersed work groups and colleagues
- Flexibility to meet growth demands
- No need to administrate the product (Disaster Recovery, Updates, etc.)
- Ability to meet regional and country security and privacy requirements
In this new normal, there are some additional considerations:
- Ability to deploy a hybrid approach by segregating data hosted on-premise and in the cloud
- Re-architecting application strategies to meet the needs of applications built for the cloud, others that perform better on-premise
- Adaptability to accommodate devices and plan for the Internet of Things (IoT)
- Ability to offer services and flexibility for employees, no matter the location
- Streamlining work processes and routines to leverage AI and human resources better
We’ve seen a rapid evolution in the way we work through this digital revolution with the accelerator all the way down, only those organizations that can adapt to the needs of their customers, employees, and the ever changing “new normal” will be able to stay relevant and productive.
Only a few early adapters could truly envision what the cloud would be today. The rapid pace of growth and change will easily see such revolutions happening in a much smaller time frame. Cloud not only offers the ability for organizations to remain adaptable in current environments, but to be flexible to the requirements that will cause them to pivot as change inevitably happens. Is the cloud the answer to all of your questions? While it may not solve all of your business challenges, it should remain an important consideration during this time of rapid digital transformation.
