Advantage of Cloud
According to research conducted by McKensey, cloud could generate more than $1 trillion in business value over the next decade for Fortune 500 companies alone. You can imagine the impact it could have on the rest of the business world. Just like every other technology, it also comes with its fair share of challenges.
Multi cloud and hybrid cloud environments increase complexity while data security and privacy concern still persists. That should not deter you from cloud adoption because the advantages of cloud outweighs the disadvantages of cloud by a significant margin. Many companies have aggressively poured thousands or even millions of dollars but have not seen the best returns from their cloud investments. This happens because businesses fail to make the most of their cloud investments. If you want to know how to get the best results out of your cloud investments, you are at the right place.
In this article, you will learn about five steps that you can take to make the most of your cloud infrastructure.
5 Steps You Can Take To Maximize Your Cloud Infrastructure
Here are five steps you can take to make the most of your cloud infrastructure.
- Focus On Business Value, Not On Cost
One of the biggest mistakes businesses make when adopting cloud is they try to cut corners. Their core focus is on minimizing their expenses and not on delivering business value. When you cut corners, you will have to settle for a below par experience. More importantly, they miss out on the real perks of cloud, which is innovation and higher productivity.
A research conducted by Mckensey suggest that 90% of cloud value lies in faster time to market, innovation, cost savings by boosting business efficiency and building better resilience. If you are not getting these benefits with your cloud infrastructure, you need to rethink your strategy. It is just like ignoring a huge chunk of the customers and only catering to a handful of them. More often than not, your business won’t be profitable this way.
Instead of focusing heavily on reducing your costs, you should prioritize cost reduction by improving operational efficiency. For instance, if you are using cloud for app development, you can drastically reduce your expenses by increasing the development speeds by manifolds. Make the most of scalability offered by cloud to get more resources without putting a huge dent in your bank account. This will not only allow business value but also help businesses in keeping the costs in check.
- Create Operating Models Around Products
If you approach the Advantage of Cloud with a traditional mindset and approach, you won’t get the results. If you are still using traditional approaches such as manual testing and time consuming reviews, it kills the whole purpose of adopting the cloud in the first place. You will have to change your mindset and create operating models that revolve around products.
Instead of delivering pieces of a product, you should look at a product as a whole. Hold a team accountable to deliver a finished product. Take advantage of automation and streamline your development and release processes. This could be anything from infrastructure code generation to Cheap vps server provisioning. By implementing a product oriented model, you can increase the productivity of your development release by 20%-25%. Yes, it could vary but at least you will be able to bring products faster to the market.
- Acquire Resources You Need
Another big mistake that businesses make when adopting Advantage of Cloud is they either acquire too much resources or too little resources. In both cases, they face issues. If you acquire less resources than you need, you will experience slow downs and mediocre performance. On the contrary, if you acquire more resources than you need, it will reflect on your monthly bill. The worst part is that you will be paying the extra price for resources you don’t even use.
That is why it is imperative to strike the right balance and find the sweet spot between price and resources. This would only happen if you assess your needs and clearly know how many resources you actually need. Yes, that might not be easy to anticipate but you can use techniques like real time usage tracking and future demand forecasting to evaluate how many resources your apps need to run smoothly.
Look at your Advantage of Cloud bill and see what is costing you the most and try to minimize that expense with optimization. You will be surprised to see how much difference this single move can make on your monthly bill. Even small changes can easily help you slash your monthly bill by one-third or even more in some cases.
- Never Ignore Fundamentals
Just because all your competitors have adopted the Advantage of Cloud does not mean that you should also jump on the cloud bandwagon. Secondly, you should never do it in a hurry. You first have to invest heavily in creating reference architecture and automation first for smoother transition otherwise, your cloud initiatives could hit a roadblock.
You don’t want cloud implemented with poor security, technical debt and long delays. Focus on developing stable and reliable cloud architecture that can help you reduce downtime by a significant margin. When you are fully prepared to take on challenges only then, you should migrate to a cloud.
- Migrate Entire Services
If you are planning to migrate to a Advantage of Cloud, you need to create a strategy. If you want to see the real benefits of cloud, your end goal should be to migrate everything to the cloud. If that seems too daunting to you, you can buy VPS hosting and then move it to the cloud later on. You can never be able to realize the true perks of Advantage of Cloud technologies if some of your services are running on the cloud while others are still using the legacy systems. Yes, you should migrate one service at a time but make sure your entire workload is running on the cloud so that traditional hardware won’t hold you back.
How do you maximize the utility of cloud architecture? Share it with us in the comments section below.
