Strategic cloud consulting guides businesses in planning, adopting and optimizing cloud technologies to achieve business goals. As reported by IBM, interest in hybrid cloud solutions has been increasing in the recent years, with over 77% of businesses adopting a mixed approach of public and private cloud options for better operational agility. This change is inevitable to keep advancing and innovating as per the market’s needs.
Another forecast by Gartner suggests that in just two years, 85% of businesses will implement a cloud-first policy, thus underlining the necessity of cloud platforms in contemporary business frameworks. Cloud consulting, therefore, has emerged as an essential service that helps organizations facilitate continuity during the transition process.
Cloud consulting eases migration to cloud platforms. It also changes business processes and models. Thanks to cloud environments, businesses can make their processes more efficient and cost-effective thus improving creativity within the organizational culture.
Cloud consulting includes various activities focused on helping businesses define their new cloud model and implement the relevant cloud technologies. This activity does not only involve data transfer but also business model redesign. Here’s a list of the principal advantages of cloud consulting:
Specialists investigate a company’s existing technologies and their performance in the company’s processes. In almost all cases, this activity leads to more effective performance and value creation.
Following the first assessment, specialists propose specific solutions such as IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS to meet business objectives.
Then, the experts coordinate and perform migration activities to avoid disruptions. The figures from Microsoft suggest that you can avoid up to 30% of operational expenses through a transition to a completely cloud-based operation.
Post-migration services help accommodate your business demands and/or technologies as and when the demand arises. Cloud solutions, indeed, provide an attractive degree of agility and innovative possibilities for businesses.
For instance, a business can try out new services or products without making large initial hardware or software investments upfront. This encourages a lot of innovative thinking; the iterative design processes are greatly enhanced by feedback from customers and users.
Considering the current highly competitive markets, the use of cloud technology can offer an edge in market competition. Cloud consulting improves competitiveness in several ways, which include the following:
Organizations can avoid heavy capital investments for physical servers and investment in data centers. A McKinsey report claims that such companies will spend less than 40% of their IT budget on the hardware required to run their businesses after moving to the Cloud.
Cloud-based solutions permit companies to scale resources up and down as necessary, without large capital investments. This characteristic enables companies to flexibly deploy new applications and services and nurture waste re-utilization and innovation through experimentation.
There are many advanced technologies that cloud vendors have such as artificial intelligence (AI) and big data technologies. Usage of such tools allows a company to construct knowledge about clients and business processes. Companies that incorporate artificial intelligence in their cloud strategies report a productivity increase of 30%.
Cloud platforms provide teams with access to data and applications from anywhere in the world. This level of interaction is important in enabling creativity because it gives different teams the ability to collaborate more efficiently.
Cloud consulting has helped several organizations foster innovation. The major tech giants and their stories of scaling up with cloud computing are as follows:
Started with a DVD rental service, the company moved to a cloud-based service that allowed it to stream content directly to customers. Using Amazon Web Services (AWS), Netflix was able to vary its infrastructure by the number of viewers it had, allowing it to provide global streaming.
GE has used cloud technology through its Predix platform focusing on industrial IoT solutions. With the help of cloud consultants, GE consolidated data from multiple sources onto a single platform and increased the efficiency of predictive maintenance and operations.
The travel giant relies strongly on cloud technology to organize the vast number of listings and user information. Utilizing cloud consulting services, Airbnb was able to modify its architecture in terms of performance and scalability to manage millions of transactions during peak periods without experiencing any system bottlenecks.
The beverage company adopted cloud consulting to implement an effective marketing approach that depends on numerous data. Coca-Cola proved to be more efficient in marketing its products by collecting and analyzing consumer data stored in the cloud, increasing customer response and sales.
The role of cloud consulting enables an organization to bring about innovative business ideas. This is so because cloud consulting deploys the most appropriate strategies for digital transformation. The trend indicates businesses that adopt cloud technologies will have a competitive advantage over the rest.
This is because, with cloud computing, organizations will be able to cut costs, increase scalability, adopt new technologies, and enhance collaboration to ensure that they are at the top of the current competition.
For businesses looking to thrive digitally, embracing cloud consulting is a strategic necessity. By partnering with the right cloud consulting firm, organizations can incorporate a culture of innovation and achieve lasting success in an ever-changing market.
Cloud consulting services can streamline your IT architecture, cut expenses, and enhance productivity by implementing cloud solutions that are suitable for your company.
Cloud consulting includes areas such as evaluating the existing cloud environment, implementing business transformation via cloud migration, embedding cloud apps, or ongoing management and training.
The cloud consulting firm guarantees the implementation of data protection best practices, concepts of compliance, and risk management by implementing adequate security measures relevant to the organization’s cloud environment.
Cloud consulting offers flexible solutions which enable companies to quickly modify the already according to the new requirements in services and resources.
To put it simply, cloud consulting is the startup phase of moving to a cloud-based approach while the latter is the phase of running and managing the systems and operations in a company.