As many business leaders know, the cloud provides increased agility to support the speed at which their businesses consume IT services and to lower infrastructure costs by removing CapEx costs. This combination drives more efficient and effective use of infrastructure resources.
And the total value of a virtualized cloud infrastructure—when combined with fully-automated and scheduled provisioning processes as well as security assurances—results in several additional benefits:
- Lower maintenance costs
- Acceleration of new application platforms
- Reduced carbon footprints
- Increased business responsiveness
- Reduced complexity during company acquisitions
- Efficient IT resource usage
- Effective handling of new workloads
- Simplified IT management
Despite these advantages, some business leaders hesitate to adopt the cloud by partnering with a cloud platform provider. Here are some common objections and reasons why they usually don’t hold up:
- The cloud lacks data security: The leading platform providers ensure sensitive data meets regulatory needs by working with customers to understand their security requirements; they also leverage SAS 70 audits to prove data is secure.
- Cloud computing costs too much: By leveraging a cloud service to procure IT services, customers shift the capital expense of IT hardware and software to a monthly operational expense.
- Preferred use of internal resources: Although this approach may work at first, in the long run, customers usually lack on-going training to keep their in-house IT staff up-to-date on technologies. Internal staffs also often find they cannot maintain the workload of managing the cloud.
- Lack of trust in outsourcing partners: This goes away when you partner with a firm that has a long history of providing managed and cloud services and one that also offers customer testimonials. The best cloud providers offer the opportunity to meet their staff and visit their facilities. The very best provide service-level agreement guarantees and pay penalties when not meeting those agreements.
To learn more about what the cloud can do for your business, visit our website where we show you how the opportunities to transform your organization through cloud technology have never been greater.