Today more and more of us are embracing the Cloud. What was, even a few years ago, still a slightly nervous and reticent journey towards cloud hosting and infrastructure has become an accelerating interest, from a wide range of industries and sectors, both private and public.
However, the Cloud doesn’t exist in a vacuum. For organisations to extract the maximum value from their cloud investment, they need to look closely at their network.
Is it ready to deliver the fast, effortless and reliable connectivity between cloud and end user that is essential for businesses to do what they want to do in the cloud, and for staff to adopt it with the willing enthusiasm that will help drive the business forward.
But first, what’s spurred this increased adoption, and why should organisations be looking at the advantages a move to the Cloud can bring them?
The business benefits have become increasingly clear over recent years. The Cloud is about agility, flexibility, collaboration, productivity – and cost saving.
Before the Cloud, most networking infrastructure investments were spent on ensuring available, reliable and high performance connectivity to on-premise data centres.
There was the on-going expense of supporting the services, plus considerable energy bills to keep the whole operation running 24/7.
Other costs included the physical space itself, 24/7 maintenance, planning for obsolescence and training technical staff.
And any one of these items could increase suddenly with company growth or a spike in customer activity fuelled by a new product or service.
Many businesses have significantly reduced CAPEX by shifting infrastructure investments from on-premise data centres to cloud-hosted data centres.
This has been of particular value to public sector organisations where CAPEX has been slashed and shrinking OPEX budgets are driving organisations to adopt utility models.
It also fits with the Government’s ‘Cloud First’ policy, where all local government agencies are expected to consider and fully evaluate potential cloud solutions for all technology decisions.
Having new and migrated productivity and IT workloads running in the Cloud can provide tremendous value to organisations by delivering cost-effective access to a comprehensive range of innovative business services and applications.
But apart from the cost saving benefits, the Cloud can also be a driving force behind increased collaboration and productivity. Your teams can access, edit and share documents anytime, from any device, anywhere, so they’re able to do more together, and do it better.
But again, without the connectivity to do so rapidly and securely, those teams may not be able to achieve the boost in productivity you’re looking for.
The Cloud can also support commercial, compliance, operational and business continuity demands, as well as boosting organisations’ abilities to remain agile in today’s competitive marketplace. Throw robust and cost-effective disaster recovery into the deal – something only larger companies could previously afford – and the deal is sweetened even further.