With worsening trading conditions, inflation and the general economic backdrop, not just in South Africa but around the world, the burden falls squarely on businesses to economise their cloud spending. It is in these circumstances that companies struggle to connect cloud costs to business value.
How, then, in a time of inflation and economic crisis, can companies better understand the value of their cloud software and how it can ultimately save a company money? Moreover, is this inability to quantify common or easy to fix?
The answer is yes, quantifying it is more difficult than people think. Return on investment (ROI) versus total cost of ownership (TCO) needs to be assessed. Companies that are moving to the cloud are reducing their level of operational ownership − this is transferred to the cloud provider with the hope that they can do it better and at greater scale than the company can.
Cloud installation costs on average will exceed on-premises installation costs but they bring tremendous − one could claim priceless − benefits, including implementation plus operational spin-offs, security, future-proofing of investments and the bonus of continuous releases of the most current software.
The entire goal of cloud ownership is to allow the business to focus on delivery.
All these gains add up to organisations no longer having to focus on managing databases and servers, but rather on sticking to the running of their businesses.
The entire goal of cloud ownership is to allow the business to focus on delivery. Let's look at some example use cases:
Insurance: The result is enhanced selling of insurance products.
Hospitals: Allows caregivers to focus on patient care.
Banks: Enable financial institutions to focus on banking service and product delivery.
Technology is not business − it is an enabler of it, a means to an end. Tech needs to support a strategic move towards a gathering of resources to focus on an organisation's core business mission.
Research has quantified the business gains to be enjoyed in many use cases/areas from a move to the cloud.
A Forrester study − commenced at the outset of the pandemic − of content management professionals, explored the cost savings and business benefits enabled by content services in the cloud. The study revealed a nearly 300% ROI over three years from content services in the cloud, as well as key findings, such as:
- Capital expenditure cost avoidance by eliminating the need to purchase and maintain servers on-premises.
- Templates and reusable workflows that increased speed in building content services.
- End-user productivity improvement due to cloud-based workflow solutions.
The Forrester survey showed 79% of respondents surveyed plan to increase content services usage going forward. The onset of the pandemic accelerated these plans for many businesses, as they needed to provide information and services to remote workers operating from home offices.
Increased usage required additional storage space with companies looking to the cloud to facilitate expanded usage.
Key findings included:
- Quantifiable benefits, such as increased speed in building content services by 75% and improved end-user productivity by at least 50%.
- Enhanced employee and customer experience.
- Reliable information storage, business continuity, and high availability of content services downtime due to lack of server storage capacity was negated.
The all-important question
According to Gartner, cloud security is the fastest-growing segment in the market for information security technology and services, with particular interest in innovations to support remote working and digital business acceleration.
Cloud security refers to the processes, mechanisms and services used to control the security, compliance and other usage risks of cloud computing. Companies are on high alert for foreign threats, with security remaining a top concern for cloud providers as breaches become more and more prevalent.
To protect their cloud ecosystems, these organisations must re-evaluate their security measures and ensure they are applying the appropriate security applications to their systems to protect themselves against inevitable breaches and further cyber attacks.
The following is a guideline to the top strategies for implementing strong security measures:
Infusing security into the application to ensure a more secure environment for customers.
Strict ISO-based protocols ensure data is safe and secure at rest, while it is being stored; in use, as it is being accessed by authorised users; and in transit, when it is transported between servers and the database.
An in-depth approach should be adopted to keep information secure. Protocols that should be in place include policies, procedures and awareness; physical security; perimeter data defence; and internal network, cloud host, application and data security.
These layers provide comprehensive protection against threats, including malicious acts by hackers or rogue actors, technology failures, catastrophic events and well-intentioned but careless users.
Above all, security needs to be written into the software code itself − rather than waiting for an outside tool to do it. When building security into the code, it builds a culture of security first − imperative when conducting business online.
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