In an uncertain world, the cloud provides a nerve-calming surety. A safe place, a refuge, a panacea to lockdown-inspired corporate headaches. When businesses should have been shutting their doors, the cloud allowed them to thrive. It’s given us flexibility, agility and a greater capacity for innovation than ever before.
If you’ve decided to embark your business on a journey to the cloud, bravo. In terms of strategic decisions, it’s one of the most important you’ll make. But it’s not a standalone move.
The cloud and its many benefits won’t just happen for you. Many businesses whose efforts to adopt the cloud have resulted in mediocre returns as they failed to maximise its value. In fact “nearly two-thirds have said they haven’t achieved the results expected of their cloud initiatives to date.” Smile IT doesn’t want you to become part of a statistic like that.
Often this is because of rushed migrations to the cloud, with no defining strategy guiding team members trying to adopt new processes.
The approach will be different for every business, but there are certainly some common things to think about when deciding how to glean as much value as possible out of migrating to the cloud and adopting it in everyday use.
Here are some of them.
How to Leverage Maximum Cloud Potential
1. Ensure a well-planned and well-executed migration.
Migrating everything to the cloud may seem like an IT exercise, but it needs to be done in conjunction with the entire business operation in mind. Prioritise how you want different aspects of your workload migrated to the cloud. The migration won’t happen at once, you need to be smart about planning the stages the incremental process goes through.
2. Educate your employees on the cloud journey.
Your team should be on board with the concept of the cloud and the benefits you’ll glean from it. People are often resistant to change, but if they’re engaged in this way and on-board with the idea it will make the adoption process seamless. Training and education on the new cloud-based systems and processes is essential. If team members are empowered to feel capable and can see the productivity benefits from the cloud, resistance to change will be minimal.
3. Use all that shiny data storage space.
You can finally move away from the complex and difficult to maintain on-site data architecture. Your cloud storage will allow for deeper data analytics, while providing peace of mind over losing your data in a hardware malfunction.
It’s one thing to move all your existing stored data to the cloud, but employees also need to form new habits around becoming accustomed to storing documents or work in the cloud rather than on legacy systems.
4. Embrace collaboration
One of the game-changing features of the cloud is the potential for collaboration. Team members can work on a project together completely irrespective of location, accessing files and editing them together in real time, all the while talking over a video call. Features like these have allowed remote work to become more prevalent, keeping staff productive no matter where they’re working from.
5. Be secure.
Security protocols should be well understood across all the team engaging with your cloud protocols. Clear security frameworks should be provided, and employees should only have access to operations and data that are pertinent to their role. The cloud is inherently secure, but most breaches are down to human error. Education, knowledge and guidance can help prevent these.
6. Break with tradition.
The cloud isn’t going to wait for anyone, it’s at the forefront of IT progress and will continue to advance at a swift pace. Traditionally businesses could upgrade their IT infrastructure and sit tight for a few years before doing so again. With the cloud, you need to break with that tradition and use the fast-paced advancements to your advantage. Automate, innovate and stay one step ahead of your competitors by using cloud tools to do more.
7. Stay organised.
Establish a clearly organised system for documents and data from the moment you set up the cloud in your organisation. You don’t want to end up with multiple dormant or unnecessary channels sprawled across your cloud landscape, confusing users and diminishing efficiency. Adopt a single system approach and ensure your team is up to speed with how to use it correctly.
As a cloud-based managed service provider in Brisbane, Smile IT has helped countless businesses migrate to the cloud. We can help design a cloud experience optimised to your unique business functions, ensuring a seamless migration and an easy adoption process.
If you’re serious about digital transformation, you should be serious about using the cloud and extracting as much value as possible out of it. And if that’s the case, you should definitely get in touch with our tech team, who will help you make a success out of your cloud journey.
When he’s not writing tech articles or turning IT startups into established and consistent managed service providers, Peter Drummond can be found kitesurfing on the Gold Coast or hanging out with his family!