In the race to serve customer needs, business leaders are under pressure to invest in digital initiatives. The competitive pressures and the need to respond quickly to customers and partners make time-to-value a key concern.
The Cloud is positioned as an enabler here by modernizing how the brand interacts with customers expecting a seamless experience, while the stakeholders see improved performance, new capabilities, and reduced time and costs. But, before a business can realistically reach such a state, they are compelled to take their “first step” to migrate their existing apps and infra 100% to the cloud and it usually takes 12–18 month migration period where benefits are only realized towards the end.
A 12–18-month front-loaded engagement is reminiscent of traditional IT practices where resource provisioning, project planning spanned months or even years, and the costs added up rapidly. Not every business can bear the burden (read dollars) of delayed turnarounds and the brunt of a severe competitive disadvantage since every other company is evolving itself equally fast, if not faster.
It usually takes 12–18 month migration period where benefits are only realized towards the end.
By taking the traditional prolonged approach to Cloud, companies
- Sacrifice market impact
- Squander internal capital
- Increase exposure to market disruptors, and
- Compound their business risk!
And for those who migrated to the Cloud at the onset to endure the long migration process awaited another challenge. According to ZDNET, almost half (47 percent) of early cloud migrators said they had teams of more than 50 people dedicated to their migration strategy and process. The dedicated resources spent their time and efforts while the business continued to “keep the lights on”, updating or rewriting legacy applications to adapt to changing market demands.
Such cases, then and now, lead to lost morale and enthusiasm of leaders, architects, developers, and IT ops staff — leading to the assumption that cloud adoption brings no new benefits to IT when compared with legacy approaches.
A Journey to the Cloud
12–18 month (or longer) delays in realizing the benefits of Cloud migration goes against the spirit and original purpose of digitization. Moreover, it creates market vulnerability for businesses at a time where businesses across every industry are gaining digital capabilities through the cloud.
12–18 month (or longer) delays in realizing the benefits of Cloud migration goes against the spirit and original purpose of digitization.
That’s when managed cloud services take the center stage. They ensure resource efficiency and agility to capture and respond to new opportunities — the hallmarks of successful cloud adoption. Managed cloud services allow businesses to consume resources efficiently based on actual business demands, turn data into insights without managing the underlying infrastructure, and eventually tap ML to generate predictive insights for the business processes. A managed services approach reaps the cost, efficiency, agility, and innovation benefits of the cloud in a way that is in pace with the ongoing digital disruption.
A managed service for your business lets you focus on your applications and data, while it takes care of the underlying infrastructure and addresses the three biggest business concerns and needs of time, performance, and security.
A managed services approach reaps the cost, efficiency, agility, and innovation benefits of cloud in a way that is in pace with the ongoing digital disruption.
And finally…be the disruptor, not the disrupted
Migrating to the cloud with a managed service provider enables you to achieve what you otherwise can’t on-prem in your legacy systems. It helps to innovate and transform your business faster and also deliver immersive customer experiences to your end users. Your workforce will not be performing the constant infrastructure maintenance jobs. And, it will put you on a fast track against your competitors, since you will do better than what you already did well.
