The hype surrounding migrating to the cloud is almost overwhelming. Technology decision makers hear insistent suggestions that “all of an organization’s resources should be migrated to the cloud immediately,” says TechTarget’s Brien Posey, former CIO for a national chain of hospitals and healthcare facilities with two decades of IT experience. But in fact, this IT trend has gone beyond hype when the most financially conservative group of C-level Executives all agree. According to Forbes, 74% of Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) say cloud computing will have the single most measurable impact on their business in 2017 and beyond.
Given the preponderance of opinion, CIOs need to take a look at their existing investments in infrastructure — from hardware to application portfolios to network architecture and beyond — to determine not IF, but WHEN migrating to the cloud will be beneficial. Their careers and future of the company depends on it, especially with CMOs owning more and more of the technology budget. As predicted, CMO IT spending nearly surpassed CIO spending in 2017 at 3.24 percent of revenue versus 3.4 percent for for CIOs. And new Gartner data shows marketing spending spiking to 12% of revenue for companies in highly competitive markets.
Size Doesn’t Matter: The Cloud Can Be Fitted for Organizations of All Sizes
The cloud is a solution for companies of all sizes in part because the cloud is customizable and scalable, and can do as much or as little work needed for an organization. The prospect of using cloud services is particularly attractive for startups with no existing infrastructure. The cloud provides access to enterprise-class data storage and infrastructure, and fault-tolerant features that would otherwise be unaffordable.
For example, San Francisco-based software firm, Smyte, went with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) from the beginning. For Smyte, it was clear the cloud was the best route to delivering the trust and safety as a service needed for peer-to-peer marketplaces including crowdfunding, classifieds and the sharing economy. Smyte worked with SADA Systems to simplify the adoption of GCP services and on initiatives to support Smyte’s fast growth trajectory and to improve its visibility within Google.
Mid-Size Companies Are Migrating to the Cloud Too
But IDC also predicts that Small and Medium Size (SME) cloud spending of companies with established on-premise computing environments will grow by nearly 20 percent the next five years. The driving factors behind IDC’s data, according to the Cloud Credential Council, are:
Convenience. Mid-size businesses want to focus on growing their business rather than running their IT.
Cost-effectiveness. The availability of on-demand computing (the customer pays for only what they use) mitigates budget concerns.
Security. Data stored in the cloud is more robust and secure than possible in a smaller company implementation.
Flexibility. Cloud enables remote accessibility for mobile workforce with a consistent experience across desktop, mobile and tablet devices.mail is posting some huge growth numbers. But that’s only part of the story.
Large Enterprises Leading the Charge
Finally, enterprises are moving to the cloud even faster than expected according to Uptime Institute’s latest survey, driven in part by the fact that around half of all enterprise IT departments have had flat or shrinking budgets. The cloud satisfies a demand from their businesses “for agility and cost transparency.”
Richard Watson, research director at Gartner, says: “No alternative offers a silver bullet: all require architects to understand application migration from multiple perspectives and criteria, such as IT staff skills, the value of existing investments, and application architecture.” The bottom line is that every company has reasons to move to the cloud, but not everything at once. The question becomes what workloads should you move first in a properly phased migration. (See video on properly phased cloud migration).
Cloud Transformation
Are you ready to start your cloud transformation?Contact us today, and we’ll chat about how we can help you move to the cloud to:
Check out the link below to read about the top five reasons for moving to the cloud, which include:
- Reduce Risk, Particularly in the Cyber Security Realm
- Focus on Business Growth without the burden of capacity planning IT systems
- Scale by using the amount of computing power you need when you need it
- Take Advantage of Digital Disruption to Capture New Business Opportunities
- Gain Deeper Business Insights by Putting the Exponential Growth of Data to Work
