What Does the Cloud Mean to Your Business?
Ask a group of people to define The Cloud and it is likely you will receive many different answers. To the developer it could mean creating cloud native applications. To an operations director it could mean a threat to the traditional operations role. To a financial executive is could mean shifting Capex and depreciation to Opex. To a marketing executive it could mean no more waiting on IT for services. For a sales executive it could mean server virtualization, cloud storage, Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas), or a host of other line items on an order form. The reality is, cloud is all these things, and none of them.
Cloud is the literal rewiring of the IT industry. It is business transformation, agility, and democratizing IT by putting it in the hands of anyone with a credit card. In many cases those hands and credit cards are no longer in the IT department. Marketing, sales, strategy, and finance are the new purchasers of the cloud. While the IT department is and will continue to be a large purchaser of cloud services, in ever increasing numbers non IT business units are purchasing their own cloud services and bypassing IT. Add to this millennials foregoing traditional permanent IT employment engagements and flocking to the temporary/contract labor market and we have a recipe for just in time IT. IT services and knowledge workers together, just in time.
Many embrace this phenomenon and expand the view beyond the commodity line items of an order and initiate higher value conversations both in and outside the IT department.
What strategic initiatives are in play over the next three years?
How is the company leveraging predictive analytics to shape the strategic future of their business?
Does the CIO have visibility into cloud consumers beyond IT?
How are these shadow IT cloud services secured?
How will continued investment in commodity infrastructure and skills propel the business forward?
How might those employees and capital be leveraged for the creation of new products and services by leveraging Managed Services?
These are but a few examples of the many consultative conversations starters which lead to deeper relationships and higher value partnerships with clients.
Make no mistake, embracing the higher value nature of the consultative cloud sale leads to purchases of server virtualization, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), Backup as a Service (BaaS), and a host of other high value, high impact services. These components form the foundation of technology business enablement. But strategic partnerships with customers are paramount for long term success as these services are themselves racing to obsolesce. As Platform as a Service (PaaS) solidifies and matures the very nature of application development is evolving to a higher form.
It is highly possible the next generation of IT knowledge workers will not encounter constructs such as servers, disks, or backups. Cloud service providers are creating compute platforms with application components which themselves exist in a “cloud”. Application logic is provided to a cloud engine for execution with results returned. How and where logic is executed is abstracted. In reality this logic executes on servers with data stored on disks but such components are being pushed down the stack, commoditized, and rendered increasingly unnecessary to the creators of modern business applications. If the basis of our client relationships are primarily providing line item components, we will not realize the long term success possible with higher value strategic business partnerships.
At Netari GCG we embrace the cloud and its strategic role in the modern business. We form long term strategic partnerships with our customers and deliver objective, skills based advisory services in tandem with their business.
How Cloud Services are helping businesses
###
Looking for more relevant solutions like this one for your organization? From cutting-edge cyber-security trends to adaptive network solutions and all the high-value services we offer in-between, you’ll find what you need at Netari Global Communications.
For more information about cloud, security or other services, complete our Contact Form or give us a call at (813) 343-0440.