A cloud strategy is critical for companies migrating to the cloud. While large enterprises are still concerned about the two main issues of cloud computing such as performance and actual experience, small and medium enterprises are showing interest in how they can implement and maximize it in their IT structures.
There are three models for cloud adoption: public, private, and hybrid cloud solutions; each has its own strengths and limitations. Some companies use a pure public cloud running on the Internet, while others implement private cloud that operates with local storage and servers within the data center.
For some companies that can’t use either solution, hybrid cloud storage gives them more flexibility and the ability to work around latency issues.
According to Lizetta Staplefoote of Shelf space“Enterprise IT teams must balance performance, compliance, interoperability, and compatibility to decide which enterprise applications or workloads make sense in the cloud, which must remain on-premises or when a hybrid cloud or private cloud is best suited.”
The question is: do you know exactly what to put in the cloud?
Whether you’re using a public, private, or hybrid cloud solution, we recommend reviewing your strategy and assessing which workloads are important to integrate in the cloud.
Here are the top four enterprise workloads:
Email Collaboration
Once these enterprise workloads are integrated in the cloud, it will be easier to communicate in a unified system, enabling all employees in your company to receive email alerts, view documents at any time, and maximize the additional features and functionality of email hosting. Within a few taps and touches of using mobile devices, productivity and collaboration happen both in and out of the office.
Web Applications and Websites
You can use your computer or mobile device to access web applications hosted in the cloud. Instead of installing the actual software, it allows you to work remotely using your smartphone, tablet or laptop while a network of servers does the actual processing.
Hosted web applications have servers that can combine all the processing power to handle requests, and they have dedicated servers that can store the data you’re working on as well as your employees’ projects.
For hosted websites, you can deploy them on multiple platforms like Joomla, Drupal, MySQL, WordPress and more.
Application Test and Development
Small and medium enterprises see the cloud as the perfect place to test and develop their applications. Whether you’re in the process of building one or to test the latest version, you only pay for what you need, giving you a virtualized in-house solution during production and development.
Customer Relationship Management (Marketing Automation)
Customer relationships are more important than transactions. While this trend is accelerating, integrating it in the cloud makes it more profitable for your company.
Getting a clear, contextually based view of a customer is somewhat challenging, and you need to have an up-to-date system to capture customer nuances and deep insights from their point of view. This goes beyond API and cloud integration, and you need the right, well-planned cloud model strategy to align all customer data with your current strategy. Customer-driven cloud integration will reshape your CRM landscape.
What do you think? Which of the following is right for your cloud?
The author works for an online business.
