Here’s What It Takes to Succeed at Cloud

What does it take to succeed at cloud? You can have a successful migration to cloud and still not experience the benefits you expect. Truly succeeding at cloud begins with understanding the technology, having a strategy that aligns cloud use with business needs, and putting appropriate support teams and systems in place.

Understanding Cloud Technology

There are many different kinds of cloud, and you won’t succeed if you pick the wrong cloud model for your business. In addition to choosing from Software as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service, and Platform as a Service clouds, you also need to decide whether you need a public cloud, a private cloud, or a hybrid cloud. You also need to decide whether you want to use a single cloud provider or create a multicloud environment leveraging multiple cloud providers. You need to know how cloud will fit into your end-to-end business workflows.

Along with understanding what cloud offers, you need to understand what cloud doesn’t offer. Cloud can free your team from much routine support, but cloud doesn’t free your team from responsibility. You’ll still need to make sure you have a way to monitor your infrastructure and have a backup strategy if there’s an outage (cloud is highly reliable, but all the big and small cloud providers have had incidents that impacted customers).

Cloud also doesn’t eliminate the need for you to implement security controls. The cloud provider protects the physical infrastructure and may implement patches, depending on the kind of cloud you’re using, but they do not completely protect applications and databases from unauthorized access. Your team needs to ensure appropriate configurations and roles are in place to keep private systems private. You need to continue to review logs to detect breaches.

Plan to Use Cloud Strategically

Cloud can be used simply to alleviate the burden on your IT team. It can also be used to provide business advantages, but that requires thinking strategically about using cloud rather than seeing it simply as a fix for technology challenges.

To create a cloud strategy, you need to understand how your current IT is limiting the business, whether they aren’t able to roll out new products and services quickly enough, there isn’t enough capacity to support demand, or other challenges.

Once you know the business problems, you can identify ways to leverage cloud to address these business needs. You can address these department-by-department or take a higher-level view and implement your cloud capability as a collection of services that can support multiple departments.

Put the Right Support in Place

Cloud changes how your technology team interacts with technology and how your end users interact with technology. You should anticipate reorganizing and retraining your technology team to provide them with the tools and skills to support the new cloud-based systems and resolve users’ problems. This may require hiring new staff or engaging a support organization that’s already deeply familiar with cloud.

How successful have you been integrating cloud technology into your organization? CCS Technology Group provides cloud services to help you understand cloud technology, develop your strategy for using cloud, and support your cloud effectively. Contact us to learn more about what it really takes to succeed with cloud.