Three Reasons to Embrace the Cloud

The cloud landscape, including public clouds and SaaS platforms, is rapidly growing. Forrester Research forecasts the public cloud services market will reach $191 billion by 2020, up from $58 billion in 2013.

Widely embraced today for its ability to enable data sharing across departments and streamline work processes, cloud computing is becoming more than a way to reduce costs; it’s becoming a means to the long-time challenge of connecting the organization and all its data points.

Here are three data benefits that result from implementing cloud solutions:
 
1. Stores and connects multiple applications. A benefit of cloud computing is that it facilitates the use of different applications. Many companies—especially mid-size companies—have offloaded nearly all of their applications and data into the cloud. One of the helpful things about cloud computing is that it allows applications and other systems to be fairly interconnected. What that means is cloud computing has opened up this standard approach to applications that you don’t have with on-premise software that provides a lot of advantages for companies. 

2. Data is there when you need it. In the past, when a customer called a contact center, the associate may not have had the ability to access the customer’s complete records, causing a delay in searching for his or her information. With a cloud-based solution, the associate can quickly get the data and information about the customer in one interface without having to manually search through different systems, providing a much smoother experience for the customer. 

3. Data migration is a cinch. Applications built on servers may take a considerable amount of time to re-architect for the cloud; however, redeveloping each one may not be necessary. Many providers allow companies to incorporate existing applications and simply tweak within their service to meet requirements. Organizations also can choose to migrate some processes to the cloud and run them in parallel with other processes on their own infrastructure. A lot of companies think they need to re-engineer their architecture and processes. That’s no longer status quo in the cloud.

Finally, companies will only realize data benefits if they carry out an in-depth business impact analysis prior to deployment. Companies can’t just look at features and functions. They must ask questions including, “What’s your ecosystem like?” and “What does your partner network look like?” They must consider how much storage the business needs, and whether any storage solution under consideration would be flexible enough for business growth. Such in-depth analysis will ultimately lead to data freedom in the cloud and the ability to enable omnichannel interactions across the enterprise.