What Business Challenges Does the Cloud Solve?

Jul 5, 2024
What Business Challenges Does the Cloud Solve?
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Cloud technology continues to be a key component of transformation strategies for most organizations today. 

Organizations continue to move to the private or public cloud to revolutionize their business operations and deliver faster go-to-market products and solutions at a lower cost. This migration helps companies develop agile models for more immediate feature enhancement delivery to stay ahead of the competition.

The cloud continues to grow globally, and many major cloud service providers offer hosting services, infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), software-as-a-service (SaaS), and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) to their clients.

Discover below how companies can leverage these cloud services to address critical business challenges! 

Advantages of a Cloud Environment for Businesses

Leveraging the public and private cloud service is a cornerstone for any organizational cloud-computing strategy. Cloud computing helps organizations shift from a capital expenditure to an operations expense model. 

Cloud services also help organizations increase their ability to respond to their clients’ short and long-term needs, lower operating costs, and provide better security for their data. 

Data Center Support

In response to growing market demands for enhanced cloud computing services, robust infrastructure, and improved data security, numerous regional and global data centers and platforms have emerged as attractive alternatives to traditional corporate data centers. Notably, several of these facilities achieved FedRAMP certification, enabling them to meet the stringent privacy and security requirements of the U.S. Federal Government. This development has addressed current security concerns and positioned these data centers to mitigate future risks.

Organizations increasingly opt for these advanced data center solutions instead of investing millions in their corporate facilities. The appeal lies in avoiding the substantial costs associated with operating and maintaining in-house data centers, which typically require significant funding for operations, a dedicated workforce, and valuable real estate. By leveraging these certified and secure third-party data centers, companies can access cutting-edge technology and compliance standards without the burden of extensive capital investment and ongoing management responsibilities.

Cost-Effective Alternative

Investing in corporate data centers can be a significant financial burden for organizations. The costs associated with building and maintaining these facilities are substantial, often running into millions of dollars. By leveraging cloud-based data centers, companies can dramatically reduce their capital expenditure and ongoing operational costs.

Leading cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), IBM Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and the Google Cloud Platform offer a range of data center solutions that eliminate the need for extensive real estate investments and costly infrastructure maintenance. These providers manage the physical hardware, security, and infrastructure upgrades, allowing businesses to focus on their core operations.

Scalability and Flexibility 

Cloud-based data centers offer unparalleled scalability. Whether you’re using Amazon Web Services for its extensive global network and Amazon S3, Google Cloud for its cutting-edge generative AI and machine learning capabilities, or the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for its enterprise-grade performance, these platforms allow you to scale your computing resources up or down based on demand. This flexibility is particularly valuable for businesses with fluctuating workloads or those experiencing rapid growth.

What Business Problems Does the Cloud Help Organizations Solve?

Organizations face continuous competition globally, in locality, and within their firm. In the last few years, many organizations have faced a surge in demand for their products and services. However, they need more visibility of their data, enhanced cost management, shorter migration timelines, more experienced internal resources, and an agile technology platform to meet client needs.

Cloud-based solutions can help organizations with business challenges, including:

Internal Data Theft Challenges

Organizations face A significant issue in their current on-premise data center model: internal data theft. People leave with data secrets, customer lists, and other critical data. The need for a better data locale is a hot topic for many considering a cloud migration project. Certain cloud services can provide better data security and reduce data security issues. 

Customer Experience Challenges

Migrating from customer services to customer success processes helps businesses address the ongoing challenges associated with the customer experience. This migration combined artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning with chatbots to optimize a better customer experience with fewer human capital resources.

Challenges with Legacy Data Centers

Organizations are phasing out legacy data centers in favor of virtualized and containerized cloud instances.

Legacy data centers continue to be a financial burden on the organization with the constant updating of IT systems, the cost of physical security, and the property tax and utility of the facility. Moving the cloud shifted many of these costs and provided exemption benefits, including data centralization, reducing data duplication, and developing a source of truth for all data within the organization.

Product Development Challenges

Organizations continue to develop new applications to support new product development and ongoing feature enhancements for their clients.

With the inception of the DevOps development teams, organizations shifted left by incorporating better-integrated security. They also leveraged vendor-specific PaaS to help unify software development and control tools, centralized depository of all source code, and continuous improvement workflow.

Time-to-Market Challenges

Organizations can solve time-to-market challenges by rolling out cloud-based SaaS applications instead of relying on in-house development efforts.

Organizations can enable newer applications in less time and pay based on an annual subscription model by adopting already-developed SaaS offerings from vendors like Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, and Apple. The cloud providers also helped organizations overcome an ongoing challenge: the need for more security patches to be applied promptly.

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What is the Biggest Challenge to Cloud Migration?

Digital Transformation strategies became more affordable with access to a multi-cloud environment that offers a manageable cost model. But, migrating to these environments can also introduce a new set of cloud security risks, including:

  • Failure to deliver on customer requests for additional product or solutions capabilities with an expedited delivery timeline
  • Lack of reliability of legacy applications
  • Lack of governance with new regulations 
  • Lack of engineering/ cloud resources to keep up with operational patching and updates 

If the cloud has a questionable return-on-investment (ROI) model, why did so many companies rapidly build these data centers? What were the benefits of the cloud?

Cloud computing’s biggest issue arose because of performance challenges. When cloud engineers and architects provisioned their various instances, the bandwidth, computing resources, and storage calculation became under-provisioned. These miscalculations result in slow data migration from the on-premise data, prominent challenges in application response to client requests, and pressing challenges with zero-day cyber-attacks. 

Using a Multi-Cloud or Hybrid Cloud Strategy to Address Risks

An effective multi-cloud strategy or hybrid cloud strategy offers benefits such as: 

  • Better global accessibility 
  • Lower cost-utility model
  • End-to-end security

These advantages can help organizations meet and exceed their transformation goals well beyond the capability of traditional infrastructures, even as they accept the known risks of cloud computing.

However, despite the positive gains made by incorporating a cloud strategy, human error in developing cloud applications continues to cause cybersecurity issues, resulting in financial and business losses.

Adoption of Cloud Computing for Business Operations

An essential part of the cloud business strategy is the optimization of business operations. Historically, back-office systems, applications, and organizations were separate. Some of these systems eventually unified when organizations adopted enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools. Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft are examples of ERP software providers.

Many of these ERP systems leverage cloud platforms. ERP helps provide a unified platform for manufacturing, supply chains, human resources, accounting, and inventory control. It also helps organizations improve their application performance issues and management of compliance regulations. Organizations dispersed globally need to ensure security and access to the ERP by their employees, business partners, and suppliers.

Previously, attempting to deploy an ERP system within an internal data center required expensive access control, cybersecurity, and costly infrastructure. These legacy deployments also became more expensive as organizations demanded a secondary locale with identical systems for disaster recovery, QA, and staging for new applications. By leveraging a multi-cloud deployment, organizations can enable capabilities faster and at a much lower cost.

Knowledge for Today and in the Future

The cloud continues to be the go-to platform for organizations wanting to improve their business through digital transformation. Despite questionable cost modeling and overall global coverage, the cloud is a far better business optimization tool than legacy in-house data centers and internal development efforts. 

With the addition of new security compliance mandates, new data structures, and integrations between various data sources and artificial intelligence, organizations will need to move their workloads to next-generation cloud platforms to run effectively. The extensive growth of data centers and demand for secure cloud infrastructure will continue to drive the need for more cloud engineers, data engineers, and cybersecurity engineers. 

cloud administration degree can help you launch or advance a career in this exciting space. With a formal education in the cloud, you can develop foundational knowledge of these significant providers and better understand how their evolution will impact organizations’ ability to govern and protect personal data and utilize cloud technology to accelerate growth. 

Ready to take the first step toward a career in the cloud? Book an appointment today with one of CIAT’s expert Admissions Advisors to discuss the pathways you can take to achieve your educational and career goals. 

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