3 signs you may need to re-evaluate your cloud solution

According to a recent survey conducted by Rogers, three in four Canadian enterprises have adopted some type of cloud service,* but for many of them, the transition has been anything but smooth. In fact, technology leaders grapple to find the data centre and cloud services that best fit their organizational needs.

What finally prompted these businesses to make these changes? According to our research, it mainly comes down to external factors, particularly the following:

Changing business needs: At 35%, business growth was highlighted as the most common reason for organizations making the latest change to their cloud solution. The need to react rapidly to changing market conditions followed closely at 34%, and 29% cited their expansion into new markets.* Why do these changing business needs result in a change in cloud solutions? Many companies initially chose a public cloud model, which allows them to use computing resources over the internet on a pay-as-you-go basis. However, using a public cloud does require you to sacrifice a lot of control over those resources, which in this case are exclusively run by the third-party provider. Most businesses would actually benefit from some mixture of colocation, private cloud and/or virtual private cloud in order to ensure optimal performance of legacy and new applications as well as sufficient infrastructural control.

Compliance requirements: About a third of respondents cited changing compliance or governance requirements as well as data sovereignty policies for why they needed to alter their cloud solution.* Public cloud often falls short of these requirements, so businesses are better off considering a private cloud or virtual private cloud solution. Both are environments dedicated specifically to one client, offering security robust enough to meet virtually any regulatory requirement. Even though virtual private cloud exists within a provider’s public cloud, it offers the same level of security a private cloud does, but it offers more flexible scalability if the customer’s workloads are hard to predict, and the billing is based on the reservation of computing resources rather than the consumption of them, which is the case with private cloud.

IT staffing changes: New IT management was cited by 26% of respondents as their reason for changing their cloud solution.* Sometimes new management refers to a new executive coming on board, and sometimes it’s a matter of the business choosing to switch IT consultancy agencies. A good way to mitigate the complexities that can arise from either of these situations is to use a cloud provider that offers professional and/or managed services on top of their solution. That way, your provider can consult on what mix of colocation and/or cloud will best fit your business, help you migrate to your new solution, configure it, and provide you with monitoring, alerting, backup, patching and reporting so your internal IT resources to focus on innovating for your business.

The shift to the cloud is not without its challenges. But as your needs change, your cloud provider should be able to help you evaluate the options and find a solution that continues to meet your requirements.

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* Rogers Enterprise Business Unit Data & Cloud Landscape Study, May 2018