Leveraging the Cloud for Growth: 3 Key Tips

22 Jan Leveraging the Cloud for Growth: 3 Key Tips

Posted at 07:00h in Cloud by Simon Spencer

The cloud is quickly becoming one of the most important technologies for modern organisations to look at as the future. But, knowing exactly how to utilise it to enable growth within your organisation is important.

Jumping headfirst into the world of cloud computing unprepared could lead to you spending in places where you don’t want to.

In this article, we’re going to go over three key tips on how you can leverage the cloud for growth within your organisation, to ensure that you can utilise the cloud properly to truly unlock your organisation’s full potential.

Tip 1: Choose the right cloud service provider.

The cloud provider you select will affect how you use your cloud deployment, feature set available to you and indeed the cost of implementation.

Different providers will provide you with different services that may or may not be better for you, meaning that it’s vital to become clued up on what different providers can give you.

There are a few different types of cloud services:

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): This provides you with infrastructure for a monthly payment, meaning that you can pay for computing and storage resources as a monthly cost over capital expenditure.
Platform as a Service (PaaS): This is an environment that gives you everything you need to build a cloud implementation, including tools and other pieces of software that will help you along the way.
Software as a Service (SaaS): This is when a single piece of software is provided as a service, rather than a whole cloud infrastructure and implementation.

All of these different types of cloud services are useful for different organisations that have different needs. For example, if you’re only needing the backbone of cloud infrastructure instead of a full platform, IaaS might be more suitable for your organisation than having to pay for a full PaaS package.

On top of this, there are a few different factors that might make some cloud providers more suitable than others —

Reliability: Ensuring that you opt for a cloud provider that has a proven track record will ensure that you’re paying for a service that you can rely on, meaning that you can rest assured that your service will be available when you need it.
Scalability: Scaling lets your organisation become more flexible and optimise with ease, so ensuring that your provider provides an easily scalable service will help you in the long run.
Security: Your information is important, and so is your organisation’s data security. Ensuring that your provider will look after your data securely with a proven track record of doing so will help you ensure that you won’t be open to attacks and breaches in the long run.

Tip 2: Optimize cloud costs.

While the cloud can have a lot of cost benefits for your organisation, it’s vital to ensure that you’re optimising your costs properly. Otherwise, you could be spending money in places that you don’t need to, which may cancel out the cost savings of moving to the cloud.

Being conscious of your cloud implementation and your needs is the best way to optimise cloud costs within your organisation. For example, knowing what your needs are will help you pick the right cloud plan, as well as keeping track of your usage and scaling your implementation accordingly.

Different providers give you different ways to manage your cloud costs. For example, some will only make you pay for what you use (known as a ‘pay as you go’ model), whereas others will require you to pay for a certain amount of allowance per month. By picking a plan that keeps your usage as optimised as possible, you can ensure that you’re not overspending.

Tip 3: Secure cloud data.

Your security is incredibly important and valuable. By failing to effectively consider security in your cloud implementation, you leave yourself vulnerable to a ton of attacks and breaches that could lead to your organisation possibly losing lots of data and money, and even possibly leading to irreparable damage.

By investing in ways to both secure your data and recover from a possible attack, you can protect your organisation and ensure that it can prosper for a long time.

The first step is to encrypt all your data. This ensures that nobody can access it without an encryption key, meaning that it’s safe from anyone external trying to steal it. This acts as a barrier to those trying to take your data and sell it to interested parties.

Another important thing to do is backing up your data and creating a disaster recovery plan, to ensure that in the case of a disaster, you’re prepared and can get your organisation back up and running as fast as possible.

You should also look at security policies and security controls within your cloud implementation, to limit who can access it and change important information only to those who need to for their work — meaning that you can help limit unauthorised access to your information and protect your organisation’s important data.

Conclusion

The cloud is an important technology for any organisation looking to take advantage of the best technology available — and these tips will let you ensure that your cloud implementation is in fact helping your organisation grow and prosper. By taking these tips on board, you can fully take advantage of the power of the cloud.

If you’re looking to get started with cloud computing but don’t know how, reach out to us today. Our experts are here to help you every step of the way and will ensure that your cloud implementation works for you.