Cloud adoption is widespread in the enterprise landscape, and companies have embraced cloud computing to drive innovation enterprise-wide. It is improving and fostering relationships with customers, as well as achieving operational efficiency like never before.
This makes one ponder – how exactly do companies measure the success of cloud initiative? What criteria is used to include workloads in the cloud? What metrics are used to calculate returns on investment? What KPIs are used to track performance? These are questions executives and managers ask when implementing cloud technology in their companies.
The cloud brings with it opportunities worth considering, however, not all organizations are prone to taking advantage of them. This is mainly due to the skill gaps and lack of sufficient knowledge in their executives and their employees. What your staff needs is technological insights and direction, and with sufficient cloud technology training, your company can be ready to dive into the world of cloud computing. Thus, allowing you provide cloud technology for your customers to not only use, but exploit it and gain a high return on investment.
Before we delve into the merits of cloud training and metrics you can use to measure your success in that areas, let us dive into the factors that drive cloud success and result in significant ROI for your company. Here are a few best practices modeled by companies who have already been through the cloud implementation process:
- As organizations implement and expand cloud usage, it can be challenging for the management to ensure they make it easy for end users to access the information they need, when they need it, regardless of the devices they are using or where their physical location is. The most effective use of cloud is being done through resource management and a unified cohesive solution by assigning identity to cloud-based services and associated applications. Centralized control to accessing cloud services is key, with appropriate resources provisioned for each user account.
- It should go without mention that success in cloud services comes from ensuring they are available 24/7, at all times. Organizations that have had considerable ROI from their cloud technology have SLA agreements with all their partners and vendors they work with to ensure availability for their customers and themselves.
- Another best practice followed by industry leaders is the using a mixed public and private cloud solutions. Each of them offers a level of support as well as service, on their, own they are simple a sum of their parts until they are integrated effectively.
- Apart from integration, organizations that have leveraged cloud successfully ha ave common management platform for all the instances they run. This provides a comprehensive bird's eye view across all their systems, offering them a clear guideline of how to be most effective by leveraging the cloud.
- The ability to envision, develop and release cloud applications in line with market, customer and user demands is paramount to increasing ROI of an organization as well as remaining competitive. This requires a properly trained staff that improves and supports the agility of the company, in addition to constantly providing and delivering new and improved cloud capabilities.
- "Mobile capability" isn't simply a saying for organizations; it is the crucial ingredient that has helped them achieve the most ROI from their cloud implementations. They offer a platform that develops the creative freedom to develop, manage, secure, and deploy mobile cloud applications.
The Capacity Utilization Curve & Measuring Cloud ROI
There is a famous illustration used by Amazon Web Services that shows the ‘capacity utilization curve’. It has become a sort of a benchmark in cloud computing. This model shows the underlying idea of cloud-based services allowed through business provisioning on-demand to match the actual usage.
The following are the business metrics that will aid your employees and executives in translating specific indicators from the capacity utilization curve, allowing them to give you measurable metrics that can both directly and indirectly benefit your business, with proper cloud technology training of course.
The rate and speed of change - Adoption/de-adoption cost and cost reduction is much faster when it comes to cloud technology. Cloud creates cost transformation gains by creating a reduction in decision delays cost through the adoption in services and a faster transition in new service capabilities. This is a unified goal for improvement in business programs which lack skills and resources and happen to be time-sensitive.
Optimization of the total cost of ownership - Users can pick out, configure, design and run applications and infrastructure that are well-suited for business-related needs. Normally, it is decoupled when the IT projects are given to production services. When it comes to the cloud, these environments are joined together.
Rapid provisioning - Depending on business’ needs, the resources are scaled accordingly; whether they expand, shrink, or are redirected. Provision of time compression can range from hours to weeks.
Cost control and increased margin - Cost control and revenue growth opportunity enable organizations to pursue new markets and customers for service improvement and business growth.
Dynamic usage - Service management and elastic provision targets business needs and end users for functionality. This is because the scope of services and users involves seeking new solutions.
Compliance and risk improvement - Green cloud computing capabilities could be leveraged by share services.
Enhanced capacity utilization - Avoiding over or under provisioning of IT service helps improve smart business services.
Access to capability improvement and business skills - Cloud provides access to new solutions and skills with the help of on-demand solutions and cloud sourcing.
The aforementioned measures provide business indicators which are used for creating a "score card". This card holds the current as well as future operational IT and business needs regarding your cloud potential. With the help of cloud training and certification, your team would be well versed in the frameworks and development tools to benefit your businesses. In addition, they would be able to evaluate opportunities in cloud computing and to focus on competitive advantage, flexibility, and security in every aspect of cloud adoption.