Cloud technology continues to be a key component of transformation strategies for most organizations today.
Organizations continue to move to the cloud to revolutionize their business operations and deliver faster go-to-market products and solutions at a lower cost point. This migration helps companies develop agile models for more immediate feature enhancement delivery to stay ahead of the competition.
The cloud continues to grow globally, and many major cloud service providers offer hosting services, infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), software-as-a-service (SaaS), and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) to their clients.
Discover how companies can leverage these cloud services to address critical business challenges below!
Advantages of a Cloud Environment for Businesses
Leveraging the public and private cloud is a cornerstone for any organizational cloud-computing strategy. Cloud computing helps organizations shift from a capital expenditure to an operations expense model.
Cloud services also help organizations increase their ability to respond to their clients’ short and long-term needs, lower operating costs, and provider better security for their data.
Data Center Support
Organizations will often choose to go into one of the numerous regional and global data centers rather than investing millions on corporate data centers that require extensive operating cost funding, human capital, and real estate.
In the Northern Virginia area near Dulles International Airport, in 2023, there are over 80 data centers either under construction or already operational.
Many of these data centers became owned by corporations, and some became owned by cloud providers like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and VISA. Others became owned by third-party cloud providers that built these data centers for the clients like the U.S. Federal Government, FBI, CIA, and DHS.
Several data centers are FedRamp certified to handle the U.S. Federal Government privacy and security requirements. These data centers became available in 2023 to meet the market demand for cloud services, infrastructure, and better data security to reduce current and future security issues.
What Business Problems Does the Cloud Help Organizations Solve?
Organizations face continuous competition globally, in locality, and within their firm. Many post-COVID-19 organizations face a surge in demand for their products and services. However, they need more visibility of their data, enhance cost management, shorter migration timelines, more experienced internal resources, and an agile technology platform to meet client needs.
Cloud-based solutions can help organizations with business challenges including:
Internal Data Theft Challenges
A significant issue that organizations face in their current on-premise data center model is the theft of internal data. People leave with data secrets, customer lists, and other critical data. The need for a better data locale is a hot topic for many considering a cloud migration project. Certain cloud services can provide better data security and reduce data security issues.
Customer Experience Challenges
Migrating from customer services to customer success processes helps businesses address the ongoing challenges associated with the customer experience. This migration combined artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning with chatbots to optimize a better customer experience with fewer human capital resources.
Challenges with Legacy Data Centers
Organizations are phasing out legacy data centers in favor of virtualized and containerized cloud instances.
Legacy data centers continue to be a financial burden on the organization with the constant updating of IT systems, the cost of physical security, and the property tax and utility of the facility. Moving the cloud shifted many of these costs and provided exemption benefits, including data centralization, reducing data duplication, and developing a source of truth for all data within the organization.
Product Development Challenges
Organizations continue to develop new applications to support new product development and ongoing feature enhancements for their clients.
With the inception of the DevOps development teams, organizations shifted left by incorporating better-integrated security. They also leveraged vendor-specific PaaS to help unify software development and control tools, centralized depository of all source code, and continuous improvement workflow.
Time-to-Market Challenges
Organizations can solve for time-to-market challenges by rolling out cloud-based SaaS applications instead of relying on in-house development efforts.
Organizations can enable newer applications in less time and pay based on an annual subscription model by adopting already-developed SaaS offerings from vendors like Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, and Apple. The cloud providers also helped organizations overcome an ongoing challenge with a need for more security patches applied promptly.
Let Us Help You Achieve Your Career Goals
What is the Biggest Challenge to Cloud Migration?
Transformation strategies became more affordable with access to multi-cloud environments that offer a manageable cost model. But, migrating to these environments can also introduce a new set of cloud security risks, including:
- Failure to deliver on customer requests for additional product or solutions capabilities with an expedited delivery timeline
- Lack of reliability of legacy applications
- Lack of governance with new regulations
- Lack of resources to keep up with operational patching and updates
If the cloud has a questionable return-on-investment (ROI) model, why did so many companies rapidly build these data centers? What were the benefits of the cloud?
Cloud computing’s biggest issue arose because of performance challenges. When cloud engineers and architects provisioned their various instances, the calculation of bandwidth, compute resources, and storage became under-provisioned. These miscalculations result in slow data migration from the on-premise data, prominent challenges in application response to client requests, and pressing challenges with zero-day cyber-attacks.
Using a Multi-Cloud or Hybrid Cloud Strategy to Address Risks
An effective multi-cloud strategy or hybrid cloud strategy offer benefits such as:
- Better global accessibility
- Lower cost-utility model
- End-to-end security
These advantages can help organizations meet and exceed their transformation goals well beyond the capability of traditional infrastructures, even as they accept the known risks of cloud computing.
However, despite the positive gains made by incorporating a cloud strategy, human error in developing cloud applications continues to cause cybersecurity issues, resulting in financial and business losses.
Adoption of Cloud Computing for Business Operations
An essential part of the cloud business strategy is the optimization of business operations. Historically, back-office systems, applications, and organization were separate. Some of these systems eventually unified when organizations adopted enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools. Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft are examples of ERP software providers.
Many of these ERP systems leverage cloud platforms. ERP helps provide a unified platform for manufacturing, supply chains, human resources, accounting, and inventory control. It also simultaneously helps organizations improve their application performance issues and management of compliance regulations. Organizations dispersed globally need to ensure security and access to the ERP by their employees, business partners, and suppliers.
Previously, attempting to deploy an ERP system within an internal data center required expensive access control, cybersecurity, and costly infrastructure. These legacy deployments also became more expensive as organizations demanded a secondary locale with identical systems for disaster recovery, QA, and staging for new applications. By leveraging a multi-cloud deployment, organizations can enable capabilities faster and at a much lower cost.
Knowledge for Today and in the Future
The cloud continues to be the go-to platform for organizations wanting to transform their business. Despite questionable cost modeling and overall global coverage, the cloud is a far better business optimization tool than legacy in-house data centers and internal development efforts.
With the addition of new security compliance mandates, new data structures, and integrations between various data sources and artificial intelligence, organizations will need to move their workloads to next-generation cloud platforms to run effectively. The extensive growth of data centers and demand for secure cloud infrastructure will continue to drive the need for more cloud engineers, data engineers, and cybersecurity engineers.
Pursuing a cloud administration degree can help you launch or advance a career in this exciting space. With a formal education in cloud, you can develop foundational knowledge of these major providers and better understand how their evolution will impact the ability of organizations to govern and protect personal data and utilize cloud technology to accelerate growth.
Ready to take the first step towards a career in cloud? Book an appointment today with one of CIAT’s expert Admissions Advisors to discuss the pathways you can take to achieve your educational and career goals.
Take the first step.
Building a strong coding portfolio takes hard work and dedication. Whether you’re just starting in the field or advancing your career, learning how to create an education plan that aligns with your career goals saves you time and money. This also delivers the most significant return on your investment.
Career Planning
You’ve chosen an education plan with a goal in mind, and now you’re focused on making the most of your educational resources to ensure you’re setting yourself up for success in the job market. The most impactful recommendation we give to all new CIAT students in the tech field is not to wait until graduation to start their IT career planning. When you begin your career planning steps from day 1 of your program, you graduate career-ready and are more likely to find your first job quickly, with competitive salary ranges.
Let us help you achieve your career goals.
When landing your dream job, CIAT supports its students every step of the way – ensuring you graduate with more than just a degree. Our IT career services team focuses on both your professional and personal development to help prepare you for a career in web development, mobile app development, information technology, cybersecurity, networking, and more.
Get certified, earn your degree, and start your path to a new career with:
- Personalized career coaching
- Industry certification workshops
- Resume building
- LinkedIn profile optimization
- Mock interview practice
- Job placement support
- Dedicated job board
- Specialty career-building workshops
- Technology career fairs and employer “meet and greets”
- Work study and volunteer opportunities