A Comprehensive C-Level Executives Guide For Cloud Adoption

In the present tech-driven world, innovations in the IT sector hold a lot of importance as many organizations are enthusiastic about adopting new IT services. Organizations are on the verge of digitizing themselves to match their competitors’ steps. Cloud computing introduces a radical shift in how technology is obtained, used, and managed to benefit an organization.

Cloud adoption and utilizing different cloud services has become a new strategy among organizations to improve their scalability and digital presence to achieve better ROI. Still, many C-Level Executives are daunted about how migrating their entire infrastructure to an external resource would benefit them.

Hence, we present a comprehensive guide providing C-Level Executives with a complete picture of technology adoption.

First, let us understand What is Cloud Computing? 

In simple terms, cloud computing is an on-demand availability of cloud services. It includes several cloud computing services such as storage, software, networks, and database over the network. Rather than saving your files and folders on your local hard disk, cloud-based storage makes it possible to keep them in a remote database and access it from anywhere and anytime.

Cloud computing has proved to be a revolution in the computing industry by offering faster load speeds and more flexible resources. This has enabled enterprises across different sectors to increase their business agility, achieve better ROI and provide better customer services.

Benefits of Cloud Computing

Cloud technology is a popular option both for individuals and enterprises. Some of the notable reasons why one must prefer cloud solutions are:

• Reduced operation cost
• Ease of use
• Highly secured and reliable
• Increased speed and efficiency
• Scalability
• Unlimited storage capacity.

Interesting fact: By the end of 2021, over 67% of all enterprise infrastructure will be cloud-based.

Now that we have seen what cloud computing means and its benefits let us step forward to understand what cloud adoption means.

What is cloud adoption?

As mentioned above, it is a new smart strategic move by enterprises to mitigate risk, optimize cost and scale up their internet-based database capabilities. It is a phenomenon wherein companies move some or all of their data center capabilities into an external cloud and access it remotely.

Challenges posed by the COVID pandemic have forced every enterprise to be a cloud player. Hence, increasingly, enterprises are transiting their IT infrastructure into the public cloud. As per a report, the public cloud market will reach $338 billion in 2021, and it is further estimated that between 2021 and 2025, this sector will have a CAGR of 19%, meaning the cloud market will touch $679 billion by 2025.

Cost benefits of cloud adoption

The one significant benefit of choosing a public resource over a private one is that organizations can save considerable money. Once a company decides to utilize the public resource, they don’t have to invest in hardware, facilities, or building data centers to grow their business. Even they need not have a large IT team with experts to overlook their data centers. All they need to do is deploy their infrastructure over an external cloud and pay their cloud service provider for how much they use.

Who needs cloud adoption?

Businesses of all sizes, geographies, and industries are adopting cloud services. However, the necessity of cloud adoption may vary to several degrees from one enterprise to another, based on their business requirements.

Here is the list of cloud adoption by industry:  

• Healthcare
• Retail
• Finance
• EdTech
• E-commerce
• Retail
• Manufacturing
• Real Estate.

As per a report, the most prominent industries looking to spend the most on cloud computing in 2021 are manufacturing ($20 billion), professional services ($18 billion), and banking ($16 billion).

Challenges of cloud adoption

Embracing a newer technology might be necessary, but it doesn’t happen overnight. Migrating an organization’s infrastructure into an external resource can be tricky and complex. Hence before actually beginning the process, organizations must be familiar with some of the challenges they might face while migrating their data to an external resource. Here we explain:

• Lack of expertise: Companies that migrate to the cloud must be very clear about all the available computing tools and services. Companies need to understand what they want to use for and ensure they have the necessary workforce to help them meet their objectives. This might demand them to train their existing staff or hire new ones.
• Lack of strategy: Most companiesstart migrating their infrastructure into the cloud without a proper plan. In the case of a new application, the process is very easy. But it becomes a tough ask if it is an old-age company application. Successful cloud migration and implementation require a strategic plan. Hence it is advised to frame a proper strategy while adopting the cloud.
• Internet connectivity: While adopting the cloud, enterprises must ensure that they have access to a high-speed internet connection. Cloud services can be better utilized using a ban-width internet connection. Internet downtime might result in vast business losses. 
• Multi-clouds and hybrid clouds: Using multi-clouds for storage has become a common scenario. Companies have started to invest in various public clouds, private clouds, or a combination of both, called hybrid cloud. Companies have started to invest in various public clouds, private clouds, or a combination of both, called hybrid clouds. While multi-cloud proves beneficial for financial and operational purposes, they add to the complexity of an organization’s overall infrastructure. So, companies must list such challenges and find solutions to grow with this new technology trend. 
• Data security: One of the significant challenges in cloud migration is data security. They are transforming a large amount of data, which may be risky.

While your cloud service provider might implement many security measures, the organization must configure its data correctly. It ensures all the services and applications have the appropriate security controls.

Conclusion:

While the pandemic has forced enterprises to move their infrastructure to the public cloud, it has also initiated a debate among several C-Level Executives on whether to adopt it. There are many benefits for enterprises of all sizes for moving their infrastructure over the public cloud. But still, top executives have various questions related to adopting new technology. Hence, in this guide, we have discussed several key prospects of technology adoption and noted multiple challenges.

We hope this guide finds an answer to your questions. Which of the above topic did you find very useful? Please share this guide with your network and help them know more about emerging technology trends.

Thanks for reading!