There's an old joke that goes: How do you eat an elephant? Well, one bite at a time of course! This approach can also apply to companies considering moving from in-house IT to the cloud in support of their business. It can be a daunting and drawn out process dealing with the integration, security and data privacy concerns that come with moving fully into the cloud. This is why it is sometimes better to start out with one digestible bite, or business need at a time, rather than trying to consume the entire cloud in one sitting.
You aren't alone
Based on my experience as a sales professional carefully listening to my client’s needs, I have found that the main IT challenges companies face include: constantly trying to reduce IT capital expenses, delivering applications to the end users faster and from any location on any device, and improving availability and disaster recovery. Even though the cloud offers solutions to all of these issues, and makes financial sense offering a compelling ROI, there is still resistance to fully embrace the cloud. If you haven't adopted the cloud yet don't worry, you are not alone. In fact, a recent Gartner survey on the future of IT services, found that only 38 percent of all organizations surveyed use cloud services today. However, 80 percent of organizations said that they intend to use cloud services in some form within 12 months, including 55 percent of the organizations not doing so today.
One step at a time
So, why the hesitation? We understand that moving to the cloud is a big change, and may be intimidating to some. The challenge for myself is to temper my enthusiasm for moving a client completely to the cloud, as this may not be the right approach for them. Many prospective clients want to move to the cloud in a more phased approach, and this is completely OK. While we always provide an option to fully move to the cloud, which we call IT as a Utility® (ITaaU), we also work with clients to identify an existing or pressing business need or IT challenge that is not currently being met and provide a cloud based solution. In essence, this becomes the launching point to the cloud for the client. Some examples of consuming the cloud in bite size pieces are:
- Hosting Email
- Email Encryption
- Secure File Transfer
- MDM (Mobile Device Management)
- BCDR (Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery) solutions
The benefits of this step by step approach is that it allows the client to justify and test out the cloud quickly. This way we can work together to create a cloud strategy that works for their company, all while more importantly minimizing potential cloud adoption indigestion. When you break cloud computing down into its individual parts it becomes much less intimidating, and instead of trying to eat the elephant in one sitting you will find you have several perfectly sized portions that you can digest at your own pace. Suddenly that elephant wasn't too much to eat after all!
Written By: Greg Halunen
Senior Account Executive, TOSS C3
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