Improving Business Agility With Managed Cloud Hosting
You spend 12 months in a development cycle, only to discover your competitors beat you to market. You had an idea of what they were working on, but you already invested a significant amount of research and development time into your idea. Now you’re playing catch up. Business agility is an increasingly important business focus, as technology innovations rapidly change the marketplace. Cloud computing services, such as cloud hosting, make it increasingly possible to adapt to sudden internal and external changes within an organization. 32% of organizations found adopting the cloud increased their business agility, according to research by the Harvard Business Review. So what makes managed cloud hosting so beneficial for business agility?
Streamlining Infrastructure
A complex infrastructure creates an inefficient workflow within your organization. The infrastructure problems could be as simple as employees not knowing where to turn for support, or as complex as major issues coordinating data between different programs. Managed cloud hosting streamlines your hosting infrastructure and introduces an element of self-service into the mix. Instead of working with a mix of on-site and off-site servers, multiple control panels, and different teams handling each aspect of hosting, cloud hosting consolidates it all in one place. There’s a single vendor contact for questions, concerns, and other important information.
On-Demand Services
Need more processing power from your servers? When you don’t utilize the cloud, you often go through a significant amount of steps to get your requisition request fulfilled. IT has to find a suitable server, order hardware if the capacity isn’t available on-site, go through budget approvals, and then maybe you get what you need. You could be waiting days, weeks, or even months. Managed cloud hosting uses a virtualized method of handling resources, so you don’t wait for the physical hardware upgrades if you need something like extra storage capacity or more RAM. You get resources allocated to you as you need, so you aren’t watching your website get crushed due to viral traffic with no way to add more server resources.
Reduced Development Cycle
Streamlining the requisition process by reduces your development cycle by eliminating the need to wait for several vendor responses every time you need a change throughout the dev cycle. Instead, you get the platform support you need, as well as the ability to make changes as they make sense. When you start your development in the cloud, it’s also easier to set up the infrastructure to offer your applications in a cloud environment instead of adapting them to the cloud after the fact.
Spreading Support Burden
It’s easy for the IT department to get bogged down with deployment, support requests, disaster recovery, and a million other tasks. If you want your organization to maintain business agility, pulling some of the more mundane tasks away from IT frees up their resources considerably. Managed cloud hosting takes care of routine maintenance and monitoring tasks such as watching server health, doing hardware repair, and updating operating systems so that your team can focus on the dev cycle.
Business agility is a requirement to keep up in today’s business environment, especially when you operate in a rapidly changing industry. Managed cloud hosting provides several agility advantages for companies, particularly when it comes to freeing up on-site resources and streamlining business operations.
Sources:
http://www.cio.com/article/2455960/cloud-computing/cloud-computing-business-agility-drives-cloud-adoption.html
