How Cloud Technology Solutions Can Help Large, Well-Established Corporations Modernise

Cloud technology solutions have been around since the mid-2000s and have, in many ways, transformed how we work, store data, connect and collaborate. However, a cloud transition isn’t solely a priority for smaller companies looking to scale and grow.

Larger commercial organisations often miss the opportunity cloud technology offers, assuming that the benefits are largely around convenience and remote connectivity. Instead, cloud tech can add significant value, driving higher revenues, more profitable margins, and reducing risk.

Today, we’re looking at cloud-based functionality at an enterprise level, clarifying how this technology can catalyse positive change, improve resilience, and augment the agility that so many bigger companies lack, giving them the capacity to respond to fluctuating markets, demands, and challenges.

Cloud-Native vs Cloud Migration: Auditing Your IT Infrastructure

Let’s begin by explaining some of the contrasting positions we encounter, which helps to highlight the strategic advantage cloud solutions can bring, particularly for more established companies who might have already introduced cloud computing or applications in a limited way.

Cloud-native businesses are normally younger, modern companies launched since cloud tech became widely available and cost-effective. Similarly, a cloud-native app or software was built and engineered to be operated from the cloud, with in-built flexibility and versatility.

Cloud migration means a company moves its data, cybersecurity, applications, and other infrastructure to a cloud or hybrid environment. Cloud-enabled apps and software can also be built on legacy infrastructure but later modified or migrated to integrate with cloud technology.

The Benefits of Cloud Native Approaches

A cloud-native application and a company that utilises these resources will often see:

• • More efficient resource allocation and usage.
  • Simple, fast updates and scaling in line with business demands.
  • Options to make targeted changes to individual modules or elements.
  • Better affordability, without hardware outlays or costly software upgrades.

In contrast, what we see most often within larger corporations that have been trading for longer is the utilisation of tech based on either cloud migration or cloud-enabled apps.

A digital transformation might involve cloud migrations to transition older software to a cloud-based system. Still, the ideal is often to go back to basics, analysing functions and features that will add value to profits or productivity and reviewing how cloud tech fits into that bigger picture.

Scheduling a full IT systems audit is a perfect place to start since it gives us an overview of all your hardware, software, networks, data, applications, devices, locations, telecoms, and connectivity to identify areas for improvement or spot sticking points that could potentially be holding your company back from further growth.

How is Cloud Technology Advantageous for Larger Corporations?

Large businesses are often unwieldy and slow to manoeuvre, which can open space for competitors and smaller disruptors to meet emerging trends or consumer appetites. One of the main drivers behind a digital transformation strategy is that business leadership recognises the need to augment resilience and create new capacity to react quickly.

While the exact adaptation or transition to cloud technology will depend on your trading sector, the nature of your company and your current lifecycle, there are several compelling advantages.

Bringing New Products or Services to Market Faster

Cloud-based applications can support end-to-end automation, which means a business can rapidly test the market and manage countless repetitive digital and manual tasks.

Compared to on-premises architecture, a cloud environment can work much quicker and be deployed in a fraction of the time it would take to purchase, install, and configure a hardware-based solution.

This same speed enables businesses to provision resources as required on demand, with the flexibility to allocate services, infrastructure, and applications extremely quickly. This provides the agility needed to respond to sudden changes in market conditions.

Enabling Businesses to Improve Functionality at Low Cost

Cloud environments work seamlessly with almost all SaaS tools, which means that a company can create a new customer application, update or revisit a process, or integrate existing functions with new third-party tools or ecosystems without delay.

Unlike conventional software licensing, cloud technology enables a business to incorporate new resources that are widely compatible without the cost of ongoing renewals and updates or increasingly expensive licensing agreements as the company expands.

As applications and third-party ecosystems innovate, this adds further advantages. Companies can expand beyond the basic infrastructure and tap into more advanced capabilities, including options like data aggregation and natural language processing.

Minimising Business Risk While Leveraging Opportunities

The nature of cloud infrastructure means that traditional and evolving cybersecurity threats are easier to identify, respond to, and eliminate while providing cost efficiencies by removing previously incurred overheads.

Tools built specifically for the cloud provide excellent authentication and robust controls and pattern analysis techniques that can work across remote and devolved workplace structures on an always-on basis.

On the flip side, cloud technology solutions also give companies the option of adding or adjusting capacity automatically in response to spikes in demand or activity, such as increased customer login volumes, at a speed at which it would be impossible to upscale capacity through on-premises services.

How to Adopt Cloud Tech Solutions Within Your Enterprise

For established companies, cloud migration may be more complex than those built with a cloud-native approach. Still, by bringing the resources and processes used in the organisation up to speed and communicating the reasons why, companies can bypass the previously high rates of cloud adoption failure – recognising how cloud computing will benefit the business, its workforce, and profitability.

Creating a cloud transition strategy is an excellent way forward. This process showcases your intentions to staff and leadership teams, clarifies the purpose of the transition, and sets out how new functions or automation will make processes quicker, easier, and more reliable.

Examples include instant access to verified data to reduce the number of static reports used in decision-making, showing how cloud solutions will help with faster problem-solving, demonstrating the value and modernisation technology offers, and empowering staff to get on board with the strategy.

For more information about the benefits of cloud technology and how this could work within your organisation, please contact the team at Jera.