A guide to building your business case for the cloud

Imagine this scenario: You understand tech. You’re an IT visionary. You’re entrusted to keep your business sharp, competitive and running at full speed into the future by bringing on the right technology at the right time.

But you can’t get your C-suite to understand how crucial a comprehensive cloud strategy is for your organization to succeed.

Why?

Because for people who don’t live and breathe the future of technology — and the opportunities that come with it — migrating a content services solution to the cloud may seem like just another inevitable technology that will happen … eventually.

But the inevitability of needing a cloud strategy won’t be put off, and we’ve got the roadmap you need to get started.

Cloud deployment aligns with business goals and creates pathways to positive results.

Here’s how.

Custom cloud infrastructure uniquely supports your content services platform

If your organization is already leveraging the power of a content management platform for your core business content and processes, you’ve already shown forward-thinking business leadership. Now, as you look to the cloud, you need the right infrastructure to not only support your platform, but also to capitalize on all its strengths and features. The optimal cloud delivery partner should be custom-tailored for your content services solution.

> Read more | The emergence of modern cloud-enabled ECM

Cloud scalability positions your business for growth and eliminates physical limits

With more digitalization comes more data, and it needs somewhere to live and expand. Leading cloud providers offer exponential growth opportunities, whether it’s:

• Storage space

• Additional computing capacity

• Application, web or processing scalability

This means worrying about the amount of space available for storage as your organization expands becomes an archaic oddity of the past.

The cloud’s cutting-edge security delivers agile, unparalleled protection

Leaders in cloud delivery have stringent and proven cloud security methods. From physical guards, mantraps and fire-suppression systems at the data centers to agile and constantly evolving cybersecurity protocols, a vendor-managed cloud strategy takes one of the most stressful, expensive and important business factors off your plate and handles it with the highest standards.

Anytime-anywhere content availability in the cloud provides your workforce the access they need to thrive

Your business can’t cling to the workdays of old — paper-based offices and unsecured processes are rarely the best way to operate anymore. A robust cloud-enabled content management strategy gives your team secure access when they need it, from anywhere, and enhances collaboration while driving business efficiencies.

Cloud resiliency enhances your business continuity strategy

In today’s always-on world, the importance of ensuring your critical business systems run smoothly 24/7 isn’t a benefit; it’s an imperative. If you are managing your own data center, that means additional hardware, software and personnel to constantly assess system health. Leading cloud providers offer essential disaster recovery and failover systems, allowing you to focus on business value rather than business continuity.

Objection: We don’t have the people we need to adopt cloud infrastructure.

Exactly — cloud infrastructure is complicated and specialized. We need our IT team to focus on their strengths, not on trying to build a bridge to the cloud that they aren’t trained for. Launching a cloud strategy for our content management solution means we would get all the benefits of the cloud — better security and accessibility, room for growth and infrastructure that supports our business initiatives — as well as a specially trained team of cloud experts who would get us there and keep us running, no matter what’s going on in the world. It’s a win-win — our IT people could focus on moving our business forward, and we get better strategic business opportunities with fewer headaches.

Objection: The cost of going to the cloud is too high.

But are you thinking about costs we can eliminate, too? We’re already paying a huge price for hosting our content — the operational costs of staffing, overtime, maintenance and physical security are a big part of our budget, and our content isn’t getting any easier to maintain.

We also need to think about the risks we take: Is our content as secure as it should be? Keeping up is going to get more and more expensive and complicated. With a content services strategy, we can shift that budget to a team of cloud professionals, and they can deal with any issues that come up while we focus on our business. Yes, it’s going to cost some money — but at least it’s going toward a long-term solution that creates agility and drives efficiencies.

Objection: It doesn’t feel safe to put our data in someone else’s hands.

I think you’d be surprised. Our team is working hard, but compared to leading security best practices, we’re really not on that level. Whether you look at it from a perspective of physical security, disaster recovery or cybersecurity, our content isn’t as secure as it could be for the caliber of enterprise we are.

Our cloud data security and protection protocols are just a segment of our primary business, but the teams that manage cloud infrastructure as their main deliverable are leagues ahead of us — we’re talking layers upon layers of defense, from constantly evolving cybersecurity, disaster-proof redundancy standards, automated security patches, encryption at-rest and in-transit, and uptime at 99.99%. And, when we put our content services platform into a managed cloud, we also enhance the security of that investment at an application level.

• Does your organization’s mission include a passion for servers, cybersecurity and content storage?

• Does it have a sizable and cloud-skilled IT team?

If not, your most efficient (and most cost-effective) path to your modernization plans may be a managed services approach.

Self-managed cloud vs. PaaS

In a self-managed cloud scenario, your business pays a host for data space, but you and your team are responsible for managing all the cloud services, from installation to updates to protection.

With a PaaS scenario, the cloud provider delivers all of these services.

Both can work. But the right path depends on your team, your business goals and your willingness to invest — and keep investing — in bleeding-edge cloud infrastructure.

Today’s technology climate doesn’t reward stagnancy.

You need action, innovation and the willingness to evolve.

Now is the time to make your cloud business case, so your enterprise can power forward into the next generation.