Jun 22, 2023

| Membership (fee-based) getty Not too long ago, executives and IT leaders were postponing their organization’s transition to the cloud. They figured they could afford to wait a few years and continue with the status quo while the cloud solution providers ironed out any technological wrinkles. Put another way, nobody wanted to lose their job by jumping into the cloud too early. Now the cloud is inevitable in large organizations. You might risk losing your position if you don’t accelerate your company’s transformation. Unfortunately, this momentum has spawned a number of suspect technologies—solutions that use all the right terminology and boldly claim to be a cloud but fail to deliver some of its most essential attributes. In this article, I’d like to share what I believe you should expect or demand from technology solutions when you move your data to the cloud. Consolidation Traditionally, the standard mid-sized office for a given enterprise would require a fairly significant hardware footprint. To support 25 people, for example, you might need a Windows File Server, print server capabilities and an authentication mechanism, which would translate into two or three physical servers in that office. To protect the data created and worked on in that office, you’d need to stand up or rent space in an offsite facility. MORE FOR YOU Then you would need to replicate this model across your region, country or even the globe for every location where you had operations. At my company, we work with organizations that have to manage hundreds or even thousands of sites, all of which may have had their own hardware. That infrastructure goes away with moving file data to the cloud. No file servers. No backup. No secondary facilities. When you move your data to the cloud, you are no longer reliant on that physical infrastructure. You trade all of those servers in all of those offices for a single cloud technology that delivers the same capabilities and allows you to manage everything centrally. The efficiency gains at the global scale alone are worth the transition, but beyond cost reduction, this fundamental architectural shift unlocks additional benefits. Access Once your data has been lifted off the hardware in your offices, manufacturing plants, studios, oil rigs or job sites and into the cloud, you fundamentally change how people can access that data. Your users should now be able to access, edit, share and collaborate on their file data from anywhere—remote locations, coffee shops or backyard offices. When seamless access to data from any location is delivered, the organization will achieve meaningful productivity gains. Today, your users may even expect this level of access. You should certainly expect it from your cloud services provider. A solution that is architected for the cloud, and not merely cloud in marketing terminology only, should be able to deliver these access capabilities efficiently to any location globally. Analytics This last point, the potential of which I detailed in my previous article , is a nascent but exciting possibility. One of the problems with the traditional infrastructure arrangement I described above is that this approach marooned data on islands of storage spread all around the world. Organizations had this incredibly rich history of their business and operations locked away as siloed data in different offices. Once this data is in one place in the cloud, you can start to think about how to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) tools from leading providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure to uncover business insights. One great example is the National Basketball Association (NBA). They’ve been using Azure AI to transform billions of data points gathered from a variety of platforms to enhance the customer experience. This data is now in the cloud, and by leveraging Azure, the NBA is able to deliver content targeted to specific fans, launch custom marketing campaigns that match individual preferences and more. Caution Transitioning file data to the cloud may not be for every organization. Before you embark on this journey, understand your specific business and technical objectives and ensure the cloud providers you choose can meet those objectives. You should also ensure that you have taken the necessary precautions to secure and protect your data. And you must fully understand all relevant costs associated with the transition. Many companies discover the true costs after they have made the transition, which may be too late. Three Essential Outcomes If you decide to go forward, what do you actually get out of this shift from hardware to cloud? First of all, the reduction of hardware and consolidation of so many disparate solutions should lead to significant cost reduction. Your new cloud infrastructure should be less expensive and easier to operate. Second, the benefit of enhanced or extended access to data should translate into productivity gains. One CIO I’ve worked with talked about this as a shift from bringing your people to the data—either forcing them into offices or flying them to distant sites—versus bringing the data to your people. On a basic level, you are going to be getting information in an appropriate timeframe to the people who need it so that they can make key decisions. Yet, you will also have the chance to design fundamentally new and more efficient global workflows for your organization. Finally, the move to the cloud should give you a significant competitive advantage. If you can leverage AI and ML services to extract more value and insight from your formerly distributed data, you could find new ways to strengthen customer engagement, like the NBA, or you could run deeper analytics on your own processes to become more efficient. A global manufacturer, for example, can consolidate data from different facilities and plants to enhance efficiency, quality checks and customer satisfaction. These three outcomes—cost reduction, productivity gains and competitive advantage—have helped to inspire and shape the product roadmap at my company. At the very least, you should consider these key factors as you evaluate potential cloud solutions. But you might as well demand them. Cloud is a fundamentally new way of architecting your IT infrastructure. The outcomes should be nothing less than transformative.