Companies of all sizes can benefit by making the move to the cloud, and mid-sized companies have special challenges that make cloud computing particularly useful for them. Unfortunately, midsize companies often make serious mistakes in their cloud adoptions that are costing them significant amounts of money and time.
So concludes the Gartner survey “Top 3 Drivers of Cloud Adoption in Midsize Enterprises.” Following is what the study has to say, along with its recommendations for what midsize companies should do when adopting the cloud.
The report is blunt about how poorly many mid-sized companies are adopting the cloud. Here are two of its main findings:
- Seventy-five percent of midsize enterprises (MSEs) base their cloud sourcing decision on inadequate financial information.
- Forty-five percent of organizations that perform lift-and-shift to cloud IaaS without optimization will be overprovisioned by as much as 55%, and will overspend by 70% during the first 18 months.
One big mistake MSEs make when deciding to move to the cloud is basing their decision on the belief that the cloud will allow them to reduce their staff or get rid of legacy hardware. The report warns: “Rarely does a cloud migration result in staffing reductions within MSEs…Well-intentioned decisions made to leverage cloud to eliminate hardware and free up resources are often rooted in fallacy. MSE CIOs must not base strategic decisions solely on the technical debt associated with aging infrastructure that, in many cases, was not architected, implemented or maintained correctly.”
Instead, the report says, MSE CIOs should look to the cloud to reduce tasks that are simple and repetitive. It suggests, “MSE CIOs with a static pool of finite resources benefit when time spent in low-value, labor-intensive activities, relating to hardware and hardware support, is reduced to the least common denominator” and moved to the cloud.
Doing that, says Gartner, will let MSE CIOs allocate resources to various initiatives that help the company, notably for revenue growth, digital transformation and increased profitability. Gartner also recommends that MSE CIOs should use the cloud as a “cost-effective enabler of disaster recovery.” And the report concludes that they should look to the cloud to help realize gains in business and IT operations.
How to Choose the Best Cloud for Your Business
Key to getting the most out of the cloud, and making sure you don’t overspend, is choosing the right one. If you’re looking to deploy web-based or mobile applications, an ideal one is Alpha Cloud. It takes care of installing and maintaining server software needed to run your Alpha Anywhere applications, allowing you to focus on building your business applications. These are among its benefits:
- Self Deploying – No server or process management required
- Self Healing – Stored configurations drive automatic recovery
- Self Scaling – As usage goes up or down, capacity adjusts to match
- Declarative – Just choose what you want (web sites, deployment schedules)
- Tightly Integrated with Alpha Anywhere – Publish directly from Alpha Anywhere
- Alpha Anywhere Application Server for IIS – Same software as we sell for on-premises
- Metered/Utility Computing - Pay based on usage
It’s elastic, so scales as needed, and automated so no manual work is required to use it. It’s highly reliable, with redundancy and failover; its shared resources make it possible to spread out the workload among multiple data centers and servers. It’s self-service as well, so you can get it immediately.
For more details on Alpha Cloud, head here.
Or take a look at our total cost of ownership study and see what you could save.
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