Companies move to the cloud for many reasons, including modernizing IT and lowering costs.
Key takeaways
With the cloud, you have can increase scalability, resilience, visibility and security.
An effective cloud strategy can transform your company’s IT and business operations.
Middle market companies are motivated to move to the cloud for various reasons, including modernizing IT operations, lowering IT costs or gaining more flexibility and security than traditional infrastructure can offer. Whatever your company’s reasons, here are six key advantages the cloud can provide.
Lower costs, increase cash flow, scale quickly
Moving infrastructure and workloads to the cloud helps you reduce hardware purchases and lower capital investments, along with the accompanying labor and maintenance costs. And that means increased cash flow. With an operating expenses model, you pay only for the capacity you need, when you need it, and gain the ability to scale quickly and easily as business demands fluctuate.
Streamline IT and enhance resilience
The cloud enables your organization to consolidate all your systems and data. It also makes these resources more accessible, accurate and consistent across your company. With cloud provider safeguards in place, you’ll also establish business continuity, better systems and application resilience, and reliable disaster recovery.
Shift to a modern way of working and an as-a-service model
Middle market companies today have offices all over the world and a mix of remote and on-site workers. Your employees need to be able to access applications and data anytime, anywhere and from any device. The cloud removes your geographical barriers and empowers employees to deliver their best work. When you move to an as-a-service model, your organization can consume just about anything through a pay-as-you-go model. This allows you to meet your specific business needs at a cost tolerance that makes sense to your business, be it software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or platform as a service (PaaS).
Enhance IT operations visibility and simplify IT management
Cloud providers typically have powerful tools integrated within their platforms that your team can use to monitor and manage all your systems through a single portal. Not only can these tools provide your company with visibility into your IT operations, but they also greatly simplify IT management so that your staff can focus on more strategic activities.
Elevate security and compliance
Most middle market organizations don’t have the security infrastructure and staff necessary to protect their systems, software and data effectively—or keep up with changing government and industry regulations. Thankfully, most cloud providers have world-class security infrastructures that provide greater access to tools and capabilities that visualize, monitor, classify and remediate threats. And they offer compliance controls that allow you to easily establish guardrails, policies, frameworks, baselines and blueprints.
Level the playing field with big-league agility and innovation
With the cloud, you have access to the same world-class enterprise software applications and IT resources that larger companies use—without all the upfront costs. These resources help you:
- Scale resources on demand.
- Collaborate for faster innovation.
- Adapt to changing internal and external business dynamics quickly.
- Expand to new markets.
- Accelerate time to market.
Bonus benefit
After a merger or acquisition, the cloud enables your company to consolidate multiple instances of applications more easily. Or, in emerging acquisition deals, where your company must exit a transition services agreement within a specific time frame, the cloud allows you to make that transition quickly.
When done right, your cloud strategy can transform your company’s IT operations as well as how your business operates—for the better.
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