Technology is expanding at a rapid pace and businesses look at digital transformation initiatives to stay competitive. Adopting a cloud-first strategy is becoming vital as businesses seek to leverage cloud computing capabilities to stay ahead in the game. Find out why you should be an early cloud-first strategy adopter.
Today’s cloud remains a platform for innovative growth with reliable and guaranteed levels of performance and uptime. Cloud-based infrastructure is becoming mainstream, and digital transformation goals make businesses explore cloud solutions.
The COVID pandemic forced organizations to transition to a remote work-from-home model. Cloud solutions enable secure access to applications, data, and storage from any device that has internet connectivity. By 2025, Gartner estimates that over 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms, up from 30% in 2021.
The cloud first strategy is becoming famous due to the immense benefits of cloud computing. In this article, you can learn about a cloud first strategy, its benefits, and how to adopt it in your organization.
What is a cloud first strategy?
An organization will first consider cloud-based solutions as a primary enabler before others when developing new solutions or enhancing IT systems and infrastructure. In simple words, cloud-first strategies are ways teams move most of their workloads and operations to cloud-computing platforms. Some of today’s most popular cloud platforms are Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.
Instead of employing physical resources such as server clusters and physically dedicated IT infrastructure, organizations store resources in the cloud, including mission-critical and secure resources. When organizations adopt a cloud-first strategy, planning for a cloud-first strategy is essential.
Things to consider when adopting cloud technologies
Many businesses have introduced cloud computing gradually, addressing individual departmental needs as they arise. Many other times, a company may have adopted cloud-based initiatives without consulting appropriate IT cloud specialists. In those cases, they miss out on planning a centralized strategy for enterprise-wide cloud adoption with a holistic approach. Without a structured approach to adopting the cloud, organizations are susceptible to “cloud sprawl”. It can lead to an increase in IT costs and pose compliance and security issues.
Benefits of a cloud-first strategy:
A cloud-first strategy empowers companies and enterprises to leverage several cloud advantages. Organizations can have various reasons to pick this approach, and they can differ from one organization to another. Your organization must do a proper analysis and the cloud needs for your organization. Some of the benefits of a cloud first approach are as follows:
Increased innovation speed:
A cloud-first approach offers agility and innovation capabilities that enable enterprises to experiment at all levels, from their overall business model to their day-to-day operations and deliver services faster.
The ability to quickly innovate while improving the end-user experience helps businesses achieve agility. Organizations can shift to an agile model and use Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) practices supported by a cloud-first approach. Enhanced cloud-based integration capabilities enable seamless integration with other cloud apps.
Ability to scale
The cloud offers scalability on demand. In times of busy traffic or heavy website activity, you can access more servers very quickly and easily. That means, for example, in the case of an eCommerce website, if your website is experiencing massive web traffic during holiday times, having a cloud-based infrastructure can enable you to access more servers for a limited amount of time, and avoid performance issues.
Thanks to auto-scaling, cloud-based systems can scale up and deliver high performance when required. Using more resources increases the cost, but more business revenue makes it often worth it, besides offering competitive advantages and enhancing business reputation.
Improve cost efficiency
Cloud computing is available at a much cheaper cost when compared to maintaining your machines. For example, here are the typical costs of maintaining on-site servers:
- IT infrastructure, server maintenance staff
- Cost of purchasing servers and other related IT hardware
- Renting an actual IT data center or physical storage space, etc.
Unless your organization is a vast enterprise, migrating your infrastructure to the cloud nearly always makes more sense.
Increased reliability
Hardware failures or power outages can happen to any IT infrastructure. It can become disastrous if the related data and applications are critical for business. Here’s where the cloud can help as cloud providers configure automatic backup and standby servers so minimal downtime or switching to mirror servers can leave a minimal impact on the outage.
Increased visibility
You need to know how your applications or sites are performing quickly. In the case of physical machines, you need to go and check each, which is a time-consuming and cumbersome affair. Here cloud providers offer various integrated tools that show the status on interactive centralized dashboards so you can periodically check your application status on the IT landscape.
Taking a cloud-first approach with your organization
Change for the better is always welcome, and the same applies when adopting a cloud first strategy. Here are a couple of points to note when taking the leap into the cloud world.
Adopt technology with education:
It would be best if you built a cloud-first culture, and cooperation from all team members is essential to implement a cloud-first strategy successfully. Employees should feel free to ask questions throughout the process.
Ensure that there is transparency about cloud-based decisions. It would help if you highlighted the significance of your cloud-first approach. Enlighten your staff on the benefits while shifting workloads to the cloud, streamline their job obligations, and improve productivity.
Your technical team must be knowledgeable and have the necessary expertise to deal with cloud technology. Supporting with technically sound knowledge from experts instills confidence in the staff. Involving a mentor to help while they work can make it an engaging experience.
Automation and self-service options:
Cloud services offer auto-scaling features so your application can scale up on demand. Cloud providers manage the infrastructure so your team can do more value-added work.
Self-service feature capabilities abound in cloud applications, and your IT department can automate specific traditional procedures and processes for business users and help desk teams. Users can perform various IT operations independently, such as file transfers, password resets, and batch processes.
Due to automation, IT administrators can spend less time on repetitive processes associated with standard business demands. It will improve service levels while lowering expenses, increasing productivity, and enhancing customer experiences.
Final thoughts on cloud-first strategies
Adopting cloud services and their unparalleled capabilities provides an organization with a wide range of benefits. If you are not sure on the exact route you should take to achieve the best results, working with external experts and using their know-how may be just what you need.
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