Is the cloud in your future?

Originally posted by DataEndure Director Of Technical Operations, Joseph Dickens, on linkedin.com

While cloud adoption was expanding rapidly even before the COVID-19, the urgent changes to business operations and procedures caused these plans and adoption to increase at an even greater rate. Companies are adopting multi-cloud strategies and putting more workloads and data in the cloud – from productivity suites like Office 365 to Customer Relationship Management suites like Salesforce.com and Microsoft CRM. In fact, Flexera’s 2021 State of the Cloud report found 99 percent of respondents using at least one public or private cloud, 78 percent of respondents are using hybrid cloud and 90 percent said as a consequence of the pandemic, cloud usage was higher than initially planned.

While the total cost of ownership plays a big part in the decision process, there are quite a few other things organizations should consider when evaluating a software “build vs. buy” decision.

• Cost of Ownership: When looking at on-prem compared to the cloud, companies will compare the cost of the on-prem solution to the monthly and yearly recurring costs of SaaS subscription. But this is not a fair comparison and does not take into account the ongoing maintenance of the hardware and software of the on-prem solution, the costs of the resources needed to support the on-prem infrastructure and software updates and maintenance, yearly software support, and day to day management. With the cloud, these costs are included in the monthly subscription cost, which also helps with a predictable monthly spend.

• Cost to Maintain: Many companies spend a significant percentage of their budgets owning and maintaining on-prem software applications, in many cases the annual cost of owning and managing software applications can be as much as four times the cost of the initial purchase. With cloud applications, the internal resource costs are much lower making SaaS more attractive and helping to reduce budgets and spend.

• Easy Implementation: Implementing an on-prem software solution can sometimes take more than a year and as things change, resources and budget can shift, often delaying the implementation of the software solution. Cloud solutions, depending on the complexity of the solution, can be implemented in a much shorter timeline, usually only a couple of months, but some can be up and running in less than a month. This helps companies realize the value of the cloud solution as quickly as possible. Cloud apps need less coding, are easy to scale as your business grows, are easy to configure and have more flexible integrations.

• Current Technology: With on-prem software, getting the latest and greatest requires a time-intensive and expensive upgrade and is usually not available for at least a year. And even then, it may not be the best idea to be the first to upgrade and QA the software for the manufacturer. A compelling feature about the cloud is that you will always be on the most recent version, with quicker access to new capabilities as soon as they are released. With your cloud subscription all new features and functionality are available to you when they are released by the manufacturer without you having to go through an upgrade process or experience any downtime.

Today, timing is everything, and many companies cannot wait months or even years for expensive and time-intensive deployments or make large cash outlays. In order to make better, faster and more flexible business decisions, you need access to the latest technology right away — not in 1 to 2 years.

Ultimately, the cloud simplifies hosting and enables services to grow and contract as business needs change, and importantly in today’s climate to be able to support distributed users.

So, you need to ask yourself: Where and how might the cloud be the answer for your business?

Whether you are looking for a complimentary health check or a thorough analysis of your environment, DataEndure can help spotlight areas of risk and opportunity to help you achieve optimal results with your cloud deployments.

Contact us today for a quick chat!