The Key Business Challenges In Order To Embrace Cloud

The IT industry  has invested heavily in educating the market in cloud computing, its benefits, the many ways it can be embedded into a business’s IT through SaaS, PaaS and IaaS and convincing the user that their data WILL be secure and always available when they need it.

However whether you are a supplier of Cloud or the consumer one of the biggest challenges continues to be the requirement to reengineer your business processes, so it optimises the opportunity that Cloud presents.

We see the future as a hybrid mix of SaaS, PaaS, IaaS and physical solutions. Every business is challenged to conclude what combination serves it best. Part of that calculation for example is how to redesign the business to accommodate that SaaS CRM offering available as a cloud service rather than doing a tech refresh on the in house physical resource. There are issues with procurement, SLA, training and then there is the risk to the data.

Similarly there are issues related to IT infrastructure. One of the features of the hybrid model is that there is an increased dependency on the network (LAN, WAN, Internet) as the back office migrates off site and the link to the remote back office becomes critical. This feature of the technical implementation of hybrid demonstrates the reliance on a competent  IT managed services provider as ‘trusted advisor’, to ensure that the business IT is of a higher quality and more robust than what it replaces.

The ‘business lifecycle’ that the trusted advisor works through, should be complemented by management tools available from service providers. For example, it should enable the MSP to in real-time, design and cost hybrid solutions for their clients, define and contract the SLA around the service, provision and handover to the client the complete solution, manage and maintain the client, bill them without dispute and transparently and then facilitate the client to grow their business beyond in a seamless manner  .

For the industry the three tier supply model of distributor, resellerand enduser can endure and reinforce the confidence and trusted advisor status that this model enables. This approach is less disruptive to each tier in the supply chain as the Data Center now IaaS provider becomes the distributor while thereseller and enduser continue to have the same commercial and ‘soft’ relationship. The engineers deal with virtual rather than physical assets and product lines assembling IT environments for their clients and the clients desktop becomes a lighter yet as effective experience as they had before.

Bottomline, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel here. Continue to trust your IT service provider and be conscious of the transfer of risk to the network part of your IT setup.  But also use tools which manage the entire process both technically and commercially.