Worldwide cloud investments reached new levels in Q2 2020, increasing by 31% to $34.6 billion. With cloud technology enabling organizations to operate remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic, this increase in cloud spending and overall adoption comes as little surprise. 

Migrating your business to the cloud increases business efficiency and agility, opens the door for new business models, and reduces operational issues. However, from the skills required to the actual implementation costs of your new cloud strategy, you may need to work harder than you think to justify the costs to your leadership team and the board.

In this article, we share some key areas to focus on, helping you showcase the value of your cloud investments.

Identify the financial benefits

Migrating to the cloud helps your business reduce costs. Rackspace posits that 88% of companies save money when running services in the cloud. A local data center can be expensive since it needs on-site staff, ongoing maintenance, and support costs that add to the annual budget. With the cloud, you can cut these costs and deploy new services faster and more efficiently, saving the company money and increasing revenue.

An added benefit of the cloud is that you can increase or decrease resources according to business needs, reducing operating costs. Rather than using a dedicated server that you own, maintain, and pay for regardless of demand, your workloads will share server infrastructure with other organizations’ computing needs.

Cloud computing also uses less electricity. When you run your own data center, your servers won’t always be fully utilized, and idle servers waste energy. Your cloud service provider will only charge you for energy used, saving you more money.

The cloud also presents an opportunity to efficiently improve your IT department’s operations by deploying your team to other areas of your business, improving your bottom-line capabilities.

Keep track of all the areas a move to the cloud can help your business save costs. This will come in handy when you need to explain your decisions and continue your cloud journey.

Identify product improvements as a result of cloud migration

Leveraging the cloud helps increase consistency and reliability in your applications, reduce lead time in the development process, and improve overall software quality. It also helps free up time and reduces the effort spent on the system’s infrastructure, making for quicker decision-making.

With cloud migration, companies no longer need to worry about updating systems as cloud service providers are likely to take care of automatic updates. Ready-to-go software updates are part of most cloud computing plans and are available at a fraction of the cost of usual licensing fees.

The cloud poses many other benefits to your organization like flexibility, enhanced security, maximum uptime, and better work-life balance for the team. It is essential to identify which KPIs are crucial to your upper management to accurately depict the usefulness and value of your cloud investments.

Work with a proven cloud partner to keep your project on-time & on-budget

Research firm Canalys found that moving to the cloud has been more costly than expected for up to 58% of organizations. If you’ve convinced your internal decision-makers of the cloud’s business value but worry about how long it may take to realize the roadmap or the risk of potentially hidden costs, partnering with a proven cloud partner eliminates uncertainties and makes your project roadmap more predictable. Plus, a partner can help you adopt a DevOps mindset, leading to a more efficient collaboration between development, operations, and quality assurance.

Wizeline takes a vendor-agnostic approach to cloud solutions and provides custom cloud strategies for each of our client’s business and technology needs. We partner with the three industry-leading cloud providers — Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure — to ensure we have the necessary resources and expertise to make every engagement successful. 

To learn more about how Wizeline can help you implement or optimize your hybrid and multicloud strategy, please contact our team at consulting@wizeline.com today.