What’s Next in Your Cloud Computing Investment?
As COVID-19 spread across the globe and enterprises rushed to accommodate the new work-from-home reality for their teams, a push for digital transformation accelerated cloud computing investment. Enterprises with cloud strategies were much more able to accommodate the shift, and those lagging behind scrambled to implement cloud solutions.
IT departments continue to pursue new strategies for ensuring business continuity, and according to a 2021 Gartner Board of Directors Survey, 69% of corporate directors want to address the ongoing disruption of the pandemic using digital strategies. Some of the key ways in which that cloud computing investment may take shape for your organization are:
Disaster Recovery as a Service: While bandwidth demand and latency have always required addressing, these issues are moving up the priority list as IT departments are largely responsible for ensuring the same standards of business continuity across organizations.
The pandemic may have offered the first real test on organizations’ pre-existing disaster recovery plans – or lack of them. Businesses are now addressing gaps in business continuity and disaster recovery, and many are doing so through disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). These services use distributed cloud resources to prevent enterprises from being dependent on a single platform. Some go even further to protect data, offering automatic failover in the form of replicated and hosted virtual servers in the cloud.
Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure: Enterprise IT is also considering how to optimize their budgets, agility, and resilience by considering how and where particular workloads are hosted. Many are embracing a hybrid cloud infrastructure to increase agility, determining where applications and workloads are best placed. Some enterprises choose a managed services provider (MSP) offering a variety of management options and network services to improve performance and security across the environment.
Cloud Management Platforms: Related to hybrid cloud infrastructure is the need for cloud management platforms (CMPs) that provide insights into the optimized placement of workloads in various cloud environments. These management solutions offer visibility into cloud services, displaying clear cost and performance information and enabling better agility.
That agility is proving crucial as companies strive to offer uninterrupted service to end users, while accessing high visibility for security purposes. If sensitive information is left unmanaged, it leaves the enterprise vulnerable to cyber criminals. Having controls in place to manage data is critical.
A CMP offers an improved cloud experience by providing better visibility into cloud resources and automation that provides clear reporting on performance, cost savings opportunities, and even the overall lifespan of assets.
Your cloud computing investment has likely developed a different trajectory since the pandemic sent your teams into a work-from-home environment. What may have been a relaxed approach to cloud adoption has likely taken on new urgency.
If you’re considering how best to allocate your cloud computing investment, contact us at IT Broker.com. From supporting business continuity to equipping your teams for better collaboration, we can help you evaluate and prioritize your needs to better prepare your enterprise for future challenges.