In the interest of cost and efficiency, businesses are always looking for ways to improve their productivity and quality level. Luckily, cloud computing presents a good enough opportunity to achieve this. In fact, it is anticipated that the cloud will house more than 83% of enterprise workloads by 2020.
In turn, businesses can enjoy better data security, a formidable competitive advantage, and improved security. For businesses looking to scale upwards, the cloud provides an unmatched opportunity, with SaaS and IaaS solutions being great platforms for businesses to do so. From storing an unlimited amount of data to housing call centers, there seems to be no end to the opportunity presented by cloud environments.
If you are thinking of switching to the cloud, here is how it can improve your business:
Why The IaaS And SaaS Are Business Growth Success Puzzle Pieces
The cloud promises both IT and business executives benefits that will revolutionize their roles. For business executives, it promises improved customer service as well as efficient business operations. Your business can deliver services faster and easier, leading to high customer satisfaction rates.
For the IT teams, cloud migration promises on-demand capacity, allowing your business to increase its storage needs as well as launch new applications in a fraction of the time it would have taken them on conventional technology. It is also easy to scale using cloud platforms as you can increase or decrease your internal system features according to your needs. Since IaaS and SaaS are typically on a pay-per-use basis, they eliminate the lost cost of having extra capacity that you aren’t using. Lastly, it makes the management of infrastructure quite straightforward. There are a lot more benefits that you can get from migrating to the cloud other than scalability. Some of them include:
Using The Latest Application Features
As long as an investment will improve the overall productivity of your business, it is ideal to invest, unless making the investment is costlier. In turn, increasing the productivity of your workforce also makes scaling upwards quite straightforward. Sadly, conventional in-house applications and IT infrastructures are a little bit harder to upgrade to improve productivity. While some will need manual upgrades, others call for investing in more storage or even looking for infrastructure that is compatible with the new additions.
Luckily, SaaS and IaaS solutions allow you to make productivity-improving upgrades at a fraction of the cost and with some more ease. Vendors can release updates as soon as they are released. Some upgrades are even done automatically to the solution, especially if vendors are looking to retain their competitive advantage. In situations where a vendor doesn’t provide the specific software or infrastructure upgrades you want, you can always rely on multi-cloud environments to work with vendors that offer it and avoid vendor lock-in.
Reduced Application Costs
If the cost of owning your applications is quite high, you might tie up funds that can be used in other parts of your business. In the conventional physical IT environments, application ownership costs are generally quite high. From having to maintain and run the in-house hardware to the actual maintenance of the applications, businesses have to channel a lot into this rigid system.
On the flip side, IaaS and SaaS-based applications are quite cheap to own. Not only can you pay for them on a subscription basis, but you can also negotiate with vendors to tailor your application package in accordance with your specific business needs. This enables you to remove and add users, save the time-to-market period for new applications, and also have control over other cost factors of the business.
In case it is tough to run your business applications on a vendor’s system, you always have the option to switch vendors. This is way better than the conventional option whereby you can be stuck with systems that aren’t meeting expectations. In turn, this increased optimization of organization resources and funds means that the saved cash can be put into other projects such as scaling your business.
Flexibility For Businesses And Users
Convenience has become one of the highest-selling commodities in the business world. If you offer flexible business solutions, you give your business a competitive advantage. Some of the best ways IaaS and SaaS solutions can improve flexibility is through a seamless opportunity to add new users to your system, customize business solutions, and even upgrade your systems with ease.
Typically, vendors will be managing the backend and infrastructural part of your business solutions, relieving you of the duty of modifying features and modules when the need arises. Also, it becomes easy to access company systems from anywhere in the world, as well as share information between key business stakeholders. When it comes to refining your services and products, cloud environments will provide you with enough visibility and insights on how to go about it.
Improved Security
Vendors typically have to ensure that they offer security solutions to remain competitive in their industry. Not only does this mean complying with specific regulations, but it also means committing to continuous penetration testing to improve the safety of their businesses. While you can always be in charge of the security of your in-house infrastructure, it is less stressful to leave this role in the hands of the different vendors you use.
They can be in charge of data encryption, software updates and patches, and scanning for security issues. Also, cloud environments can easily act as your data backup solutions, especially for sensitive data that is vital for daily operations. Unlike when storing the data in-house, you can easily retrieve any lost data when using SaaS or IaaS solutions. However, it is always wise to vet your vendors thoroughly before working with them.
The Essence Of Vetting Cloud Vendors
Your business has a lot riding on how the vendors you choose to handle their services, which makes 3rd party vendor management essential. For instance, in case a vendor has a great support team and typically responds to requests fast, this will reduce the chances that your business will be affected adversely by some downtime. Some of the things you put on the line while working with a vendor are compliance to specific regulations, your business’ data security, the levels of efficiency of your customer service, and how easily you can integrate your business needs with their solutions.
Ideally, the trick is to be very thorough in vetting the different vendors. It might be impossible, in some situations, to find a vendor that fits right into your business’ needs, but they should at least meet a good portion of the expectations. You can work with other vendors to fulfill the missing requirements. Be sure to compare their compliance efforts and security practices to what you need as a business.
At the very least, they should offer firewalls, basic network segmentation, and VPN compatibility as part of their security system. It might also be wise to focus on third-party access control to reduce the risk that comes with offering third-party vendors access to your data. If your business needs specific security controls in place that vendors do not offer, consider investing in these solutions yourself. Of course, it is wise to ensure that the vendor’s solutions are compatible with your business security systems first.
The benefit galore that the IaaS and SaaS solutions provide businesses cannot be ignored. However, your business will only benefit from its scalability benefits if you choose the right vendors. Ideally, you should enjoy the perks the cloud provides without lowering your business’ quality standards. Consider switching to IaaS and SaaS solutions to prop your business’ growth up for success.
Last Updated on February 3, 2021.
