Whether your company’s a small local business or a member of the Fortune 500, it’s likely that moving key applications to the cloud could help you boost productivity, improve security, and reduce costs. The cloud is making it possible for small and midsize businesses (SMBs) to access enterprise-grade computing resources, and is accelerating innovation in the world’s largest companies.
In today’s world, discussions about harnessing the cloud’s business value should be taking place at the board level. If they’re not—or if your board is still talking only about migrating to the cloud—you’ve probably already missed out on some vital opportunities.
After all, leveraging the cloud doesn’t just remove the need to manage your own infrastructure, or help your business better support hybrid or remote employees. It also gives organizations the opportunity to minimize business risk, save money, and become more agile. In a competitive marketplace, these advantages can drive profitability and growth, which can make all the difference when it comes to business success amidst economic uncertainties.
While taking advantage of cloud capabilities can benefit your business in many ways, here are five things that it’s especially important for your business to consider investing in.
Cloud providers adhere to the industry’s highest standards when it comes to securing their data centers, hardware, and environments. They’re well-versed in regulatory compliance requirements ranging from GDPR to HIPAA, and know how to meet customers’ needs—even those in highly-regulated industries like financial services or the defense industrial base (DIB).
Microsoft, for example, invests approximately $1 billion in securing its cloud infrastructure each year. Its cloud offerings run on an infrastructure that was built from the ground up with today’s data security and privacy needs in mind, and the company continues to innovate to ready itself for tomorrow’s.
Leveraging a public cloud provider’s infrastructure, platform, or applications ensures that you’ll always have access to best-of-breed security capabilities—without needing to build or maintain them, or hire hard-to-find talent yourself. It also ensures that vulnerabilities will be remediated as soon as they’re made public, and that security best practices will always be followed.
Adopting a data-driven approach to decision-making across your business can allow you to make faster and better-informed decisions, predict where the market is headed, and improve customer experience. Building and managing the data infrastructures needed to support this kind of decision-making is no easy task, though. By taking advantage of pre-built cloud offerings, you can harness industry-leading resources with minimal effort and little upfront investment.
Tools like Microsoft PowerBI or AWS analytics can give stakeholders across your organization visibility into the metrics that are most important for the success of the business, with no need to build out custom capabilities. Instead, you gain instant access to a launch pad. Your team can experiment, try new things, and add capabilities as they need them—with data hooks that are already built into your existing cloud services.
These days, ChatGPT is the talk of the town. Generative AI services like OpenAI’s ChatGPT have evolved rapidly to offer instant access to information in the form of easily-understandable conversational dialogues. They can help teams summarize content, highlight key insights, compose text, and assist with brainstorming.
AI’s capabilities go far beyond ChatGPT, however. Organizations can leverage predictive analytics for use cases ranging from determining when manufacturing processes will need maintenance to figuring out which marketing tactics are most likely to generate leads. They can use digital twins to accelerate product design and testing. Or they can leverage advance algorithms to improve decision-making across the business.
Instead of building out the complex, large-scale data management capabilities that your organization would need to take advantage of these rapidly-evolving technologies, you can streamline your adoption of best-of-breed capabilities by using pre-built cloud offerings. This makes it faster and easier to implement AI-driven applications, putting AI within reach even for small companies with limited budgets.
The most common workplace model in today’s companies is hybrid. With some employees working from corporate offices, some working from home, and others in the field or at customer locations, there’s a pressing need to ensure equitable and consistent digital experiences for everyone. Cloud-based endpoint management solutions allow you to achieve this aim, giving everyone the opportunity to connect to tools and resources in a way that’s simple, streamlined, and secure.
Leveraging virtual desktops that are hosted in the cloud means you’ll no longer need to manage on-premises hardware, that your systems will be instantly and effortlessly scalable (so the organization is prepared for growth), and that you’ll no longer need to worry about patching vulnerabilities or updating operating systems. You’ll also be able to right-size your investments in hardware, ensuring that people have exactly the right devices for their roles, as well as the level of access to resources that they need to get their jobs done—and nothing more.
As customer expectations for digital experiences continue to climb, it’s increasingly important for businesses to innovate on the fly. This creates a need to build apps and new functionalities faster, making the adoption of modern application development pipelines increasingly attractive.
If you take advantage of the cloud’s elasticity, you can quickly and easily spin up all the resources you need to build, test, optimize, and release new apps and capabilities that will realize value for your business. Cloud-hosted development tools are cost-effective and scalable, making it possible for your teams to achieve more in less time, so that your business can delight its customers.
These five cloud capabilities are a great place to start, offering a means of realizing business value almost instantly. But they’re only the tip of the iceberg.
Want to learn more about how the cloud can help your business grow and thrive? Reach out to a member of Netrix’s team of experts to schedule a free, no-obligation consultation today.
Eric Xu is a consultant in the Modern Applications & Data Intelligence practice at Netrix Global. His expertise in cloud solutions allows him to translate technical concepts into actionable strategies to optimize productivity and collaboration. Passionate about empowering people through technology, Eric excels at prioritizing clients’ needs, then delivering tailored solutions that drive business success. Prior to Netrix, Eric earned his master’s degree in information technology from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.”
