Why you need a Cloud Consultant
“Cloud Computing” has got to be the most misunderstood term since the technological revolution began. Not to mention all the sub-terms and acronyms that go with it.
With all these different flavors of computing, how a business leader know which one to pursue?
The good news is, you don’t have to. All you need to do is adequately define what your real requirements are and find the service that meet those needs. A Cloud Consultant can help.
A business computing environment can be broken down to three parts. Processes, Data, & Services. Applications align with your business processes, store & retrieve data then deliver it to the user through a service. The questions you need to ask yourself are:
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How is my data stored?
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Are the processes aligned with my business?
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How fast & reliable should the service be?
A Cloud Consultant should ask you some critical questions to help you define requirements. Do you care where you data is stored and how secure it is? Are your business processes well defined and are they efficient? How much downtime and delay can your business handle?
Knowing these questions will help the consultant find the best services for your business. A good consultant will address these issues before getting into cost.
Speaking of cost. The draw to Cloud Computing isn’t always that it’s cheaper, though that’s often the case. The real reward comes in the fact that the costs are predictable and scale up and down with utilization. With the right set of services, the costs will be more predictable and help drive down your bottom line.
Internal solutions usually start with a costly investment in hardware, software, services & infrastructure. These costs generate negative value when they’re fist deployed. The value doesn’t come until the utilization of the services hits a certain threshold. Once the business starts using the solution, there’s a brief value add and the investment pays off.
Eventually the utilization will out live the capacity of the solution, and upgrades will be required. What happens then? Another large investment. The costs of upgrading, migrating and shutting down the old systems come in to play and now it’s even longer before you recuperate the costs.
In contrast, a solution “As A Service” doesn’t usually require a lot of up front costs. A monthly fee is applied based on utilization so that the costs will scale with the value the solution provides. As your organization uses the service, the costs will rise. If the service doesn’t add value and it’s used less, the costs go down. It’s much easier to retire a service and the upgrades are handled by someone else.
CBC Solutions is a product agnostic organization that specializes in defining the business requirements and aligning solutions up that meet those needs with a predictable cost model with verifiable efficiency metrics.