You’ve heard the buzz around cloud computing, but have you heard about cloud agility? Cloud agility is the ability to rapidly reconfigure operations in response to changes in the market, business, or technology. It gives your company the flexibility to alter processes and provide an optimal user experience in a timely fashion. Cloud agility increases efficiency and can improve reliability while saving real resources — which all adds up to a lot of money.
Following are the 5 reasons why cloud agility improves your bottom line:
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1. Structure
Agility necessitates the use of two components: a hybrid workforce and a digital workplace. A real office presence may be costly, and travel can be stressful for employees as well as the environment. According to the National Association of Realtors, the commercial real estate market is improving but remains sluggish in comparison to before the coronavirus outbreak. In the first quarter of 2021, large commercial real estate acquisitions declined by 28% year on year. Furthermore, 70 percent of survey respondents reported that organizations are leasing offices with little square footage as a result of the work-from-home trend.
Agility is a mindset and an approach that allows you to adapt and respond quickly to change in your business. Agility allows you to prioritize the most important customer requests, scale up or down based on demand, and facilitate improved collaboration across departments. When employees are able to work more flexibly, they are also more productive.
- You don’t need massive upfront capital expenses: An outdated IT infrastructure can cost you a lot of money upfront because of the equipment, manpower, and maintenance costs required for hardware-based solutions. Cloud computing solutions like Microsoft Azure allow you to pay for what you use and nothing more. In addition, by allowing your employees to access the data anywhere via any device, it enables them with greater flexibility which results in increased productivity at less expense.
- You are not limited by local resources: By using cloud-based solutions hosted remotely rather than locally in your own data center or server room, you don’t have to worry about spending time on securing your data center or even maintaining it; rather focus on how best to use that storage space such as repurposing it into meeting rooms or offices where employees can collaborate better with each other without any physical limitations since they would all be working off cloud-based solutions anyway.
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2. Processes
In the pursuit of becoming a leader in the industry, it’s easy to be fixated on developing strategies that will attract customers and drive revenue. But behind every successful strategy is an equally powerful plan for how to execute it. These business processes are what allow your organization to make good ideas a reality. In fact, when we surveyed over 200 businesses, they rated process as the single most important driver of their success at enacting their strategy (31%).
While it’s possible for any company or organization to establish standard processes around their operations and workflows, it can be a difficult feat for many larger enterprises with complex structures and hierarchies. If your team suffers from siloed departments or decentralized operations, there’s a chance that you will struggle with getting everyone on the same page about how things should be done moving forward. The cloud provides you with an opportunity to change this through standardization – but only if you do it right.
3. People
The greatest resources any business has are its people. This is why it’s so important to hire and retain the best talent, not just in terms of technical skills but also interpersonal skills, motivation and problem-solving ability. Your staff need to be able to work well together—and they need constant training and re-training.
But it’s not enough for your employees to simply be the best at what they do. To succeed today, your people need the right infrastructure in place: a back office that can afford them the same level of flexibility as an agile front office; data management systems that support collaboration; tools that let them work from anywhere; integrated business processes that drive greater efficiency across teams and functions.
4. Technology
You need to be a technology company. But what does that mean? You may think it’s just operating a computer system and software, but your business is more than that. It’s about the product you deliver, how you market and sell it, and how your team collaborates in real-time. It’s about creating meaningful engagement with customers by delivering exceptional service.
To make all of this happen—to deliver on the promise of being a technology company—you need integrated technology solutions from people who understand your business needs and goals.
5. Strategy
- Determine your current state of cloud adoption by identifying and assessing your cloud-based IT capabilities.
- Define your cloud strategy, which should include a clear statement of the mission and goals for each cloud initiative.
- Develop an operating model for your cloud environment to govern key decisions about how the service will be delivered, supported, and consumed.
- Determine the right mix of large (hyperscale) public clouds, small public clouds, private clouds, and traditional data centers to meet your needs in the most cost-efficient manner possible—while ensuring security and compliance requirements are met.
- Evaluate whether to build or buy various components of your IT infrastructure such as compute resources, storage systems, networking systems open-source software elements such as Hadoop or OpenStack
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Our Final Thoughts Why Cloud Agility Improves Your Bottom Line
In its simplest form, cloud agility is about reducing the friction of moving digital assets from one environment to another. It offers the flexibility to scale up or down, fail fast without endangering the business, and focus on what matters most: the business goal.
It provides an increased ability to respond to opportunities, threats, and innovations. And it’s worth prioritizing because the true value of cloud agility comes in a time of crisis—but it’s hard to commit time and resources towards a strategy that’s only successful when your world is falling apart. The investment needed to gain this advantage will pay off significantly as you are continually forced to address an ever-changing marketplace.
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