Many entrepreneurs tout cloud for the potential cost savings it brings companies. But in this time of intense innovation and competition in business, fortunes are being made and lost not just on how many pennies an organization can save, but on how dialed in it is to the needs of its customers.
Migrating to the cloud is a journey that challenges organizations, and specifically their IT departments, to take a fresh look at the way they do business, and to keep focusing on overall goals even when difficulties are met along the way.
What has become clear in recent years is that the adoption of cloud is a necessary step for companies that don’t want to lose their competitive edge. With 80 per cent of all IT budgets soon to be committed to cloud apps and solutions, cloud is a journey more and more companies are taking seriously.
Cloud makes sense
Small, medium, and large businesses are migrating to the cloud for a variety of reasons, including:
- Better collaboration – In growing organizations, operations and responsibilities can be difficult to collate. Collaboration is needed between multiple parties to complete important tasks in a tight timeframe. Data shared on the cloud can be accessed by all employees, and documents can be worked on simultaneously.
- Freedom through scalability – Cloud is on-demand, meaning a company pays only for what its needs. This is ideal for companies with fluctuating bandwidth demands. The elasticity of cloud gives companies operational agility — a key advantage — which means they are free to scale up or down as business demands.
- Backup and recovery – As cloud systems can be set up to back up all data at regular intervals, recovering from disasters, while not easy, is not the panic situation it might otherwise have been.
- Time … to innovate – Employees (especially IT) that are freed from mundane, time-eating operational tasks can focus on being innovative and on better serving customers. Result: a sleeker, more streamlined operation.
AWS drives true value
Amazon Web Services (AWS) gives customers the means to not just reduce costs but also to offer new services, become more productive, gain a deeper understanding of customers, and go to market faster. Customers using AWS are more mobile, more data-intelligent, and are better able to keep their data secure and accessible worldwide.
AWS helps customers achieve excellent business results by:
- Fostering innovation – gain new business insights, deliver services faster, and come up with exciting, new offering for customers based on comprehensive data. Innovation comes from data, and with AWS cloud, customers can access and analyze petabytes of data, and turn that analysis into action.
- Adding reliability and capacity – gives customers capacity and reliability that is difficult to get with on-premise solutions. Netflix uses AWS to push its streaming content to tablets, mobile devices, and the Internet, regardless of location.
- Enabling the enterprise – customers can manage applications, quickly access data, and deploy quickly and cost-effectively
As a global cloud leader for over a decade now, AWS has helped more than one million customers across 16 regions worldwide clear obstacles to innovation like high costs and complexity. As of 2014, AWS had five times more capacity than the other 12 leading cloud providers combined; by 2015, this capacity gap had doubled.
You can learn more about AWS Cloud by downloading “The Business Value of AWS: Succeeding at Twenty-First Century Business Infrastructure.”
