Using cloud to scale your business

The world is going through a peri­od of rein­ven­tion. Even before the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic, firms in every ver­ti­cal were work­ing method­i­cal­ly to achieve busi­ness growth. Many were aim­ing to become soft­ware-cen­tric com­pa­nies, using data-dri­ven work­flows and run­ning on the wide­spread deploy­ment of dig­i­tal plat­forms. The dri­ve for dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion remains, but the pan­dem­ic has accel­er­at­ed the cadence of what had pre­vi­ous­ly been a rea­son­ably sys­tem­at­ic, planned pro­gres­sion.

When COVID-19 struck, many busi­ness­es had to close their phys­i­cal facil­i­ties almost overnight. This meant mov­ing to online, vir­tu­al, pre­dom­i­nant­ly cloud-based tech­nolo­gies to keep dai­ly oper­a­tions mov­ing. The tech­nol­o­gy trans­for­ma­tion that com­pa­nies regard­ed as impor­tant, but essen­tial­ly aspi­ra­tional, sud­den­ly became fun­da­men­tal.

In many cas­es, firms have realised that to achieve com­mer­cial sur­vival and sub­se­quent rein­ven­tion for future busi­ness growth, they must adapt to an even more dig­i­tal­ly empow­ered world than they had first envis­aged.

Onwards (and upwards) to cloud

As front­line health­care and oth­er key work­ers kept life run­ning in the UK and else­where, the busi­ness world realised it didn’t have the lux­u­ry of plan­ning, strate­gic coun­sel or even the option to hold face-to-face meet­ings. It’s well known that when busi­ness­es embark upon a new mar­ket or prod­uct devel­op­ment, the first step is to put the foun­da­tions in place. In 2020, there was no time for that. This meant organ­i­sa­tions had to find ways to estab­lish faster, more flex­i­ble and more effi­cient work­ing prac­tices with lit­tle or no time for foun­da­tion­al plan­ning.

The cloud mod­el of ser­vice-based com­put­ing cen­tralis­es on a shift away from cap­i­tal expen­di­ture (capex) costs and respon­si­bil­i­ties because the cloud provider sup­plies the infra­struc­ture, tech­nol­o­gy plat­forms, and many of the soft­ware ser­vices and appli­ca­tions. This move to an oper­a­tional expen­di­ture (opex) mod­el gives even small com­pa­nies the chance to access economies of scale that were once reserved for large enter­pris­es.

The busi­ness ben­e­fits of cloud can be trans­lat­ed direct­ly into fast-track busi­ness growth for star­tups and accel­er­at­ed scale-up devel­op­ment for organ­i­sa­tions on the cusp of expan­sion. Equal­ly, a more flex­i­ble abil­i­ty to tap into opex-charged com­put­ing resources can allow estab­lished com­pa­nies to rein­vent, co-cre­ate and col­lab­o­rate, pro­to­type and inno­vate in ways they may not have con­sid­ered as recent­ly as the turn of the mil­len­ni­um.

Making growth possible for any organisation

Impli­ca­tions for busi­ness growth of cloud back­bones are far reach­ing. World regions that were once tech­nol­o­gy poor can now, with an inter­net con­nec­tion, tap into the same “pipe” as busi­ness­es any­where around the globe. A three-per­son start­up in a city with no par­tic­u­lar tech­no­log­i­cal prowess or com­mu­ni­ty can poten­tial­ly have as much access to com­put­ing pow­er as a firm in Sil­i­con Val­ley.

In a recent Pub­lic First sur­vey, car­ried out in part­ner­ship with Ama­zon Web Ser­vices (AWS), 67 per cent of com­pa­nies using AWS, said their busi­ness or oper­at­ing mod­el would not be pos­si­ble with­out the cloud. This is part of our new nor­mal.

Some com­pa­nies still har­bour mis­giv­ings and uncer­tain­ties about the busi­ness ben­e­fits of cloud. If our IT stack and data is nev­er on our own premis­es, then how do we know whether our infor­ma­tion is safe? If we have to use even more expan­sive cloud ser­vices in the post-COVID era, for more com­plex data exchange and col­lab­o­ra­tion appli­ca­tions to sup­port remote work­ing, how can we be sure remote secu­ri­ty exists? The fact is that most cloud ser­vice providers know more about net­work secu­ri­ty than most organ­i­sa­tions, what­ev­er the indus­try ver­ti­cal.

The wider scope of cloud

Secu­ri­ty, data gov­er­nance and infor­ma­tion com­pli­ance func­tions will all form a cen­tral part of a com­pre­hen­sive enter­prise cloud ser­vice provider offer­ing at its core. But organ­i­sa­tions have the chance to lever­age far more than “just” the core com­put­ing, stor­age, infor­ma­tion man­age­ment and net­work­ing func­tions of cloud. Pro­gres­sive com­pa­nies look­ing to exploit the full poten­tial for busi­ness growth in the cloud will need a full toolset of tech­nol­o­gy func­tions.

A ful­ly fea­tured cloud ser­vice provider will offer some­where in the region of 200 ser­vices all aligned for spe­cif­ic tasks and func­tions. This would typ­i­cal­ly include tech­nolo­gies built to ser­vice data ana­lyt­ics, robot­ics, machine-learn­ing and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, inter­net of things, mobile devices as well as vir­tu­al and aug­ment­ed real­i­ty.

But despite all this on-tap pow­er, many organ­i­sa­tions still, unfair­ly, regard cloud com­put­ing as com­plex, tough to orches­trate and dif­fi­cult to imple­ment. This is where cus­tomers should look to the breadth of exper­tise avail­able inside their cho­sen cloud ser­vice provider. Web-based train­ing, self-paced labs, cus­tomer sup­port, third-par­ty offers and, in some cas­es, ser­vice cred­its for star­tups are all avail­able.

Tech you don’t have to think about

They say the best tech­nol­o­gy is tech the user is not even aware of. These are soft­ware tools and appli­ca­tions users will access every day, with­out nec­es­sar­i­ly think­ing about the fact they might be deliv­ered via the cloud. From com­mu­ni­ca­tion and col­lab­o­ra­tion ser­vices to data-rich appli­ca­tions, visu­al­i­sa­tion tools and busi­ness dash­boards, the cloud has mas­sive breadth and depth. It is capa­ble of deliv­er­ing uptime and ser­vice pow­er rapid-growth and indeed, in 2020, rapid-change firms need, with­out the cap­i­tal out­lay that would have been required before the cloud era.

Cloud pro­vides a plat­form for com­put­ing that acts as a flex­i­ble busi­ness plat­form for com­mer­cial growth, agili­ty, expan­sion and change. Organ­i­sa­tions that tap into the pow­er avail­able from the cloud engine room posi­tion them­selves intel­li­gent­ly for busi­ness growth and dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion. The cloud is indus­try agnos­tic, large­ly loca­tion agnos­tic (depend­ing on local broad­band access) and, above all, it is soft­ware appli­ca­tion agnos­tic, which means that quite lit­er­al­ly any­thing is pos­si­ble.

Over the next decade, the total impact of the cloud on gross domes­tic prod­uct is like­ly to dou­ble as a grow­ing share of the econ­o­my takes advan­tage of cloud tech­nol­o­gy. Adopt­ed cor­rect­ly, there’s no cumu­lus fluff on the com­put­ing cloud. It offers sol­id steps towards new heights of busi­ness growth.