Out of all the things that came along in the 21st century to transform business across industries, few have been as impactful as the advent of the cloud. Computing power and storage that can be scaled to meet a business’s varied needs while reducing the costs associated with owning and managing your own servers – what’s not to love about that?
At Mariner, we’re seeing the growth of businesses who are converting to a cloud storage solution. We believe that for most businesses, the cloud is inevitable. It’s not a question of “should I convert?” but a question of when. It’s also a trend that has been accelerated by the rise of remote work.
Business leaders will need to assess whether they have the right skillsets and capabilities to manage a move to cloud storage. And if they don’t, they’ll need the right partner supporting them through the transition.
Challenges You Might Face – and the Solutions
When transitioning your business operations to the cloud, here are two challenges we commonly see clients face:
Many are used to infrastructure they can see and touch. The data they have is all under control. Not so with the cloud – it can be a big culture shock for many organizations.
- Solution: as it becomes easier to access infrastructure at an unlimited scale, it makes it easier to scale up and manage issues around infrastructure. It’s also simpler to leverage these scale efficiencies for cost optimization. With the cloud maturing, these are things organizations should seriously consider if investing in IT infrastructure. Agility, resilience, data integrity, data security, and testing at scale: these are the factors that attract businesses to invest in the cloud.
The cloud is constantly evolving. If you have already invested in the cloud, knowing how to optimize your investment after the fact can be challenging. It can be tough to stay current with new services being offered.
- Solution: invest in a trusted partner to travel on this journey with you. You need the proper mix of knowing what to do in the cloud along with just how to do it.
Finding the Right Cloud Partner
The right partner will take a holistic view as they guide you through your transition to cloud-based storage. They will understand your business’ needs and view them through a lens of cybersecurity (including processes) and change management to help your workforce adjust to this new reality.
These are critical components that need to be embedded in your transition, not left as an afterthought.
It’s also essential that your partner is not attached to any one cloud solution for your business. There is no “one size fits all” approach – this partner needs to understand that all businesses are different and that their cloud solution needs to align with their corporate culture and provide value.
By moving to the cloud, businesses can benefit tremendously – and their clients or customers will benefit equally from experiencing the resilience, agility, and effective resourcing that sets a business apart in a globally competitive market.
The right partner can make a difference to your cloud deployment.
Moving to the cloud is more than a technological challenge – you need to understand the impacts on other parts of your business – people, process, security compliance – to ensure you’re getting the best value for your investment.
By engaging with Mariner, you will have access to our skilled and experienced team of professionals who know how to help your business navigate through the good and bad of migrating to the cloud and how to manage it moving forward. We’ll embed ourselves in your organization to ensure you have the necessary tools and processes to support this significant change.
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Zafar Muhammad
Practice Lead, Infrastructure and Cloud
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