Cloud trend is influencing venture-backed startups to biggies’ upto an ostensible level, but how far does it impact the mind of CEOs? Let’s face this- whether your enterprise is in a quest to build its own private cloud or seeking a reliable cloud hosting provider – there is no status quo when it comes to defining path towards cloud.

Not to mention, the Cloud is a massive transformation that fortifies businesses with its extensive compute capacity, storage, networking, and virtualization resources. To support the aforementioned, let me take you through what CEO Larry Ellison once said in the Oracle Open World.

Expanding business, increasing performance and providing short-term fulfilment on quarterly basis are always in CEO’s priority list. In order to standby all these aspects in tandem to economy, the only way left before them is to work on cost metrics, all without sacrificing security and compliance needs. If reports are to be believed, achieving optimum performance is always complemented by top-layered security, which ultimately mounts pressure on CEOs to increase their capital bracket.  

Why Some CEOs Hesitate to Gear Up for Cloud Adoption?

Moving an enterprise’s legacy IT into the holistic cloud hosting environment is challenging for CEOs as it is a question of their business sustainability. Leaving their conventional setup and switching to a completely new environment can be a risky game – such thought refrains them to become cloud friendly. A feeble decision can drain out their market footprints and can chuck out from competitive business realms.

Debunking these scary thoughts is necessary as it will enable them to turn their big picture dream into reality. In the same context, it is imperative that CEOs must learn the possibilities of cloud computing.

In this Blog, You will Get to Know the Importance of Cloud Computing and How it Will Support Your Business Transformation Ambition:    

Just to brief you, cloud offerings are primarily segregated into three categories:  raw computing capacity, computers that are installed with software, and software itself.

Let’s Throw a Light on Cloud Computing Significance?

The cloud computing industry is a bandwagon - evolving rapidly and generating lots of jargon. However, there is a lot of uncertainty & skepticism revolving around the cloud world, specifically among technocrats who have rich insight and expertise with, or association to, on-premise computing. CEOs and other senior dignitaries need to take the onus for bringing their organization on the right track of cloud computing.

Three Major Concerns that Always Crop up in the Mind of CEOs are:

- Why will the cloud be a big deal beyond the IT department?
- What are the primary concerns and trouble areas of skepticism, and
- How valid are they?  

To address these concerns, all CEOs must know the instinctive benefits of cloud computing which are given below.

Making Individuals More Productive- Traditionally, managing uploads and downloads of all the critical business documents with internal FTP server is a bit difficult task. In addition to this, the burgeoning data entails “out of capacity” situation. With cloud based content management and file sharing application, you can augment productivity of individuals working at your company. Importantly, resources stored on online content management application can be accessed on the go via any internet-ready devices.       

Expediting Collaboration- One of the great successes of cloud computing till date has come from allowing groups and communities to collaborate faster that was intricate with the conventional systems. CEOs can improve the way knowledge was captured and shared among thousands of employees with the help of cloud-based collaboration software.  

Mining Insights From Data- Analytics is one of the great aspects that every CEO needs for astute decision making and business progression. Companies today deal with a massive amount of data, and cloud service providers are addressing all such capacity requirements on-demand. It provides quick capabilities, including hardware and algorithms to meet priority needs. Using cloud analytics, companies can control their business operations in more granular way without facing any shrinkage.
 
Developing and Hosting Applications- Without denying the fact that cloud gave us the capability to acquire resources on-demand in a very quick and easy manner, it enables CEOs to increase the scaling capacity, computing capacity, and the speed at which the resources can be accessed and deployed.  Beyond faster deployment and on-demand provision, cloud helps in augmenting operational functionalities and business performance.

The Skeptic’s Trouble Areas:

For all its outstanding benefits and leading proponents, the crusade towards cloud computing is considerably slow. Below listed are some concerns that most of the CEOs have:

     
Cost- One of the widespread concerns of many CEOs is on comparative cost of cloud computing. The findings about cloud cost have been contradictory. Well, the focus on cost is misguided because of two reasons. First is that most companies don’t spend huge capital on technology, so even the substantial changes in maintaining IT infrastructure won’t make a large difference on the income statement. Secondly, overtime the economies of scale of developing and running technology (equipping complete infrastructure) will favor the cloud.

In my last blog “Does Cloud Outstrip Conventional Data Centers”, I have shared one of the Gartner studies that self-connote the cost-efficiency of the leading cloud technology. Have a glance over it:

Note: A host of research reports published today unveils the cost benefits linked to cloud. Reading out Forester, Gartner, and IDC reports will give you enough idea about the same.

Reliability- Many of skeptics envisaged that cloud is not a reliable option when it is compared to a well-managed on-premise IT infrastructure. With a major downfall of leading web service providers, cloud computing offerings are gradually learning this lesson and improving the redundancy and reliability factor. Unquestionably, each outage by a reputed cloud vendor receives huge attention, however, overall cloud reliability records are appreciable- and would be competitive to most on-premise operations.   

Note: It is explicitly advised to all CEO’s that they should design architecture that can endure in case of service interruption.           

Security- There is no dual thought that firewalls can be breached; transmissions can be intercepted; malicious activities by viruses, worms, and spywares can invade. Perhaps, the most distressing thing is- people who are responsible for digital signatures can be the perpetrator. Like service interruptions, cloud security breaches are a big buzz among many CEO’s. Well, the better way to approach 100 % security is to setup no computers (Lol…). Next, excellent approach is to continuously monitor the threat landscape; rely on best technology; develop best technological enhancements to safeguard devices, networks, and transmissions; hire excellent digital security specialists.

Not only in terms of scalability and spectacular IT savings – Cloud hosting will also defy traditional data centers in terms of security.
                                                               --- Gartner
Note: Today, trusted cloud vendors who are interested in the large enterprise market are making intensive attempts to incorporate administrative functionality into their products; so as to alleviate security concerns.

Well, there are a majority of CEOs on the other side who anticipated that control and flexibility of the cloud infrastructure has helped them to grow faster, turn down their Capex and Opex metrics. In addition to this, it has maximized overall throughput and return on investment. But, for many of them, it is still hard to measure.

Think… how you would feel if your rivals started pulling your leg behind in those areas that can be simply enhanced by changing your computing infrastructure! As the cloud matures, its providers will continue to innovate and become distinctive in their offerings. So, the only way to learn about them firsthand is to follow cloud footsteps.