Transform IT on the cloud for better productivity and efficiency.

Cloud drives modern technology, and many businesses are yet far from achieving the true potential.

In this article, we share our first-hand experience to make your IT transformation on the cloud by opting three best ways.

IT transformation is the process of reassessing your IT assets for improvement and modernizing to address the changing business requirements and goals. Moreover, a step forward to adopt new trending technologies.

The very purpose of IT transformation on the cloud is to enhance performance, additionally optimize costs.

To bring in the cloud to your transformation strategy, analyze the business function that requires transformation on to the cloud, and classify and group the whole IT under Software, Platform, and Infrastructure.

Transforming the software – Productivity Suite

 Software is vital for one or more business functions to support daily work. 

Productivity suite, business email, mission-critical applications for project management, sales, and marketing, human resources, estimating, designing, accounting, and the list can go on.

Let’s begin with business email as a reference case.

Microsoft Office 365 suite or Exchange online and Google suite offerings are both excellent for businesses. Pick the right one that suits your business.

From a 2017 survey by Osterman Research Inc, 64% of respondents say that the drive for the use of Office 365 is to streamline IT operations, 53% user productivity and 54% to reduce the cost of delivering services.

Microsoft’s offering has a large install base and comes with familiar desktop options, whereas Google lacks desktop options.

However, if cloud transformation is to start at the software, give a try with your business email first.

Transforming the Infrastructure - Backup

 The second option to IT transformation with a cloud-based solution is the backup.  A critical task of an IT is backup, and it falls under the infrastructure classification.

Your backup solution should help you simplify restore procedures during an emergency. It must be flexible, secure, and cost-effective.

Azure backup gives you a great cloud experience.  You can configure backup with your existing systems on-premise and later extend the capabilities to combine a hosted site.

IDC’s recent survey claims that organizations utilizing Azure backup services and Site recovery see an average annual reduction in their total cost of operations (TCO) by 46% per year improving overall IT staff productivity, backup performance, and data recovery operations. 

The respondents also claim that they were able to minimize unplanned downtime and reduce expenditures for backup related hardware and software.

Transforming the software – Line of Business Applications

 Line of business applications is an increasing part of IT consumption.  Assess those that are running within your office or out of your data center and determine which ones you'd need to offload to the cloud.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a choice if your vendor offers you for the present software, or, go for a new SaaS type.

An alternative is to migrate the applications to a managed cloud hosting model, or a self-service public cloud.   You'd save costs by not reinvesting on software licenses.

SaaS and hosted software, both are a delivery model that satisfies the NIST cloud definition. Choose the one that fits your business requirement.

If you prefer to host all your applications, Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, Google Cloud are the top players of Infrastructure as a service provider (Iaas). Nevertheless, you'd need a technology partner to help set up and transition.

We assist our customers on Microsoft Azure hosting applications providing anywhere access. 

Conclusion

 As change is unavoidable, so is cloud transformation.

Begin your cloud transformation with either one, or all of these - business email, line of business applications, and backup. 

Do a phase by phase transformation, gain control on the overall migration, and learn along with the changing trends.  IT transformation on the cloud is a steady process, and it will enhance productivity and efficiency.

Work with a technology partner to guide you through the transformation process and help achieve your IT goals.