Cloud computing is growing massively. This technology gives you the power and flexibility to set up a virtual office and connect with your business partners, team members, customers, and clients from any part of the world. The ongoing shift to cloud computing by organizations across industries shows that this entrant in the world of technology is not a fad but here to stay.
It transforms how organizations obtain, use and manage information and make decisions. Cloud computing offers tons of benefits to businesses, including:
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- Flexible trading between capital and variable expenses
- Ability to make crucial capacity decisions fast
- More agility and speed
- Improved collaboration
- Reduction in data center spending
- Power to connect globally
- Backup and restore data
- Mobility
- Data security
- Quality control
- Disaster recovery
- Business continuity
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These are just a few cloud fluency benefits, and the list continues. To be precise, cloud integration is the most feasible way to ensure your organization is future-ready. However, users must be adept in cloud computing to use it to its full potential. Therefore, building a fluency program for the cloud is crucial.
Cloud fluency ensures your team is ready to operate in the ever-changing cloud space with confidence and resilience. Moreover, you need to implement a program enterprise-wide to ensure cloud fluency is not just limited to technical team members but also among non-IT staff like sales and marketing teams.
Here is a blueprint for building a cloud fluency program for improved teamwork and the bottom line to make things easy. Let’s get started:
- Encourage Participation and Leadership
Regarding cloud fluency programs, fostering a culture of learning and education is vital. Encourage your team members in diverse roles (non-IT or IT) to lead, and share their knowledge with others for successful cloud adoption and integration organization-wide. Give them the power to step forward and share their knowledge with peers.
If you promote participation, your organization can make transitioning to the cloud faster and with higher efficiencies. You can build champions that share their wealth of knowledge with other staff members, ensuring all departments utilize cloud apps successfully. Rest assured, this step can become a powerful differentiator for your business.
These evangelists serve as catalysts for successful cloud adoption. They play a pivotal role in developing a well-devised communication plan. This plan reaches all organization levels and shares proper guidance and the cloud fluency program’s goals. Hence, it becomes easier to make the shift with minimal confusion and clashes when communication is clear. - Invest in Training
Along with providing cloud knowledge, you must train your staff. Professional training will help your staff put that training into action. Once all team members understand the capabilities of the cloud and how to use it to its full potential, your team can shift from an idea to execution collaboratively and faster. Put simply, knowledge with training will allow you to empower your staff to think big and create efficiencies across the company successfully.
For best results, hire a training partner to help maximize cloud short and long-term impact. Such a training partner can assess your staff’s skill levels and design the best learning strategy with a mix of formal courses, hands-on sessions, digital learning, and immersion days. Indeed, quality training, support, and knowledge will help build an effective and result-driven cloud fluency program much needed to achieve higher staff performance and productivity. - Provide Structured Opportunities
Another way to build, implement, and ensure the success of a fluency program for the cloud is to set up structured opportunities for employees of your company to demonstrate their learning, expertise, and best practices.
Promote a healthy competition to boost learning and drive participation. Also, make sure to encourage and appreciate their efforts. This way, they will be prompted to get industry-recognized certification for the cloud. Besides providing recognition, it will also drive their excitement to learn, grow and master their expertise. - Get Involved
When building a cloud fluency program, you must ensure that learning is implemented. Therefore, you should include strategies to test their knowledge to become hands-on with the cloud. Some of the best ways to test your team’s skills are to challenge them to build an API or website. These experiences add value to your team and eventually develop their skills which they can harness in upcoming projects to maximize profits and productivity. - Make Sure to Establish and Report Metrics
You can never gauge the success of a cloud fluency program if you don’t define your metrics. Therefore, it is advisable to establish metrics before you get started. For example, you can track your progress by the number of cloud certifications acquired by team members or the different ways in which they use the new skills learned.
Another metric you can use to determine the successful implementation of cloud computing is tracking the number of workloads of the organization that have moved to the cloud in a given period. Moreover, when selecting metrics, ensure they address the organization’s business relevance.
Also, a trait common among businesses that have successfully implemented fluency programs for the cloud is that they attach these metrics to their management by objectives (MBOs) and business outcomes. So, clearly define the metrics so you can measure success and make changes to the program when needed.
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Conclusion
In today’s dynamic and overtly competitive business landscape, cloud fluency is table stakes for any organization. Cloud adoption and optimization can help your business realize massive cost savings while boosting efficiencies and profits. Therefore, organizations must invest in and implement cloud fluency programs to manage, secure, and govern the most sensitive cloud environments. These programs support and promote learning and skill development much needed to prepare teams for the cloud to leverage it for maximum performance. So, if you want to shift to cloud computing, start by building a cloud fluency program to ensure a positive response from your team and a smooth transition with minimal resistance to change.
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