Moving to Cloud Thinking – Part 1, Business Agility

Top 5 ways the cloud can make your business more agile

The modern business world changes quickly, whether it’s a great new product which has everybody talking or a collapse in demand for a certain service. Successful businesses tend to be the ones which handle these shifts swiftly and don’t find themselves wrong-footed. Moving to cloud thinking is a great big step towards making your business more agile. Here’s why…

1. You can reach it from anywhere

It doesn’t matter where you are in the world. If you’ve got a computer and an internet connection, using the cloud allows you to access your documents, applications and emails from anywhere. It’ll come in handy if you’re at a meeting in Indonesia and need to pull up a document, or if one of your employees gets snowed in and can’t make it into the office.

2. Your cloud can be anywhere

The cloud lets you be closer to your customer, which is especially important if you have clients across the globe. Data protection laws in some countries dictate how and where information is held, but you can overcome any legal issues by setting up a cloud over there in minutes. There is also quality of service to think of, so you can provide a more efficient service to your client.

3. Meet demand by scaling up, and down

When you talk about what holds companies back from moving quickly, IT is right up there. Maybe it’s application development or you suddenly want to shift where your company goes in the market? With the cloud you can change quickly. It’s so much easier to deploy new infrastructure – what used to take months can now be done in minutes. The cloud can be scaled up to meet demand if you find you have a gold mine of a product on your hands, but it can also be scaled down should that demand drop off.

4. Open cloud gives you more freedom

Open cloud is the way forward if you want your business to be as agile as possible. Nobody wants to be locked in with a cloud provider, especially if something unexpected goes wrong. The cloud is all about being able to move things around and not putting all your eggs in one basket. The key benefit of open cloud is that you can use more than one cloud to reduce the risks you face, or even move to a new cloud in a different country, if you want. We recently launched a large-scale next generation cloud, powered by OpenStack™, which gives businesses unprecedented freedom. It’s worth checking out.

5. Guarding against future problems

An agile business needs to be resilient and your cloud should be, too. Good planning is what helps you get the real benefits from the cloud, allowing you to mitigate against lack of availability or application problems before they even come up. You can architect the cloud to give you better uptimes than traditional uptimes which you would get with your own datacentre. Someone can be on hand to provide you with support – and we Rackers are awesome at it.

If you can think of any more ways in which the cloud can make your business more agile, then leave a comment below. But just be sure to look out for the next blog in the series.