The Obvious and Unobvious benefits of Cloud – Part 2
My previous blog focused on the cloud benefits that most organizations look at, while trying to make a decision if the move to the cloud is beneficial or not.
However, there are other major advantages that needs to be part of the decision making.
This blog will concentrate on these unobvious cloud benefits and must not be taken as granted.
The benefits of moving to the cloud are ones that organizations do not take into account, yet are crucial as part of the decision making if it makes sense to move into the cloud or not.
Cloud Benefit #1: Clear and Defined SLA
In today’s world, there is a lot of competition across all businesses, no matter in which industry your business is, and as we all know, any person expects fast service and fast resolution.
Availability is a critical aspect of any business, as if you are not available for your customers once they need the service, you will probably lose those customers to other competitors.
Businesses that deploys solutions on-prem do not really get a committed SLA for availability, due to the fact the business itself owns the data center, infrastructure and internal processes.
However, deploying the same solution in the cloud while the vendor host the solution will always be with a well-defined SLA for availability, which means availability is measured very strictly for making sure the cloud customers will be always up and running.
Cloud Benefit #2: Customer Success Executives
Moving to the cloud is a strategic decision, and you should get the optimal experience across the whole lifecycle, and the Customer Success Executives are the ones that provide this experience.
Customer Success Executives are assigned for each of the cloud customers and holds several key roles, such as the following:
- Ensure proper sales to service handover
- Follow along the customer implementation to understand their critical goals and key performance metrics
- Tracks the implantation, and support the customer go live
- Perform Periodic Business Reviews
- Track critical communication touch points throughout the customer lifecycle
- Primary caretaker of the service experience
- Feedback channel for driving product enhancements
- Engage with various customer contacts to ensure success on all avenues
Eventually the Customer Success Executive is a key point making sure your business will succeed not only in the movement to the cloud, but also in making sure that you will leverage the most from the solution and get the optimal experience.
Cloud Benefit #3: Comply with Strict Change Control and Risk Management Processes
No business wants to experience outages, either on-prem and definitely not in the cloud.
Outages usually have 2 main reasons:
- Change
- Infrastructure / Hardware failures
It is quite easy to overcome the Infrastructure challenge once you have in place N+1 redundancy for all of the underline infrastructure and utilities, such as power supplies, network devices, physical servers, utilizing virtualization technologies and more.
Same goes for using public cloud while protecting the instances, storage and applications. Using snapshots, machine images and adding automation for achieving high availability, even prior of leveraging the applications high availability capabilities.
However, changes in the environment can happen several times a day, either if it's installing OS patches, firmware updates for network devices, adding resources to machines, Access control changes and much more.
Without a very strict change control and risk management processes, those changes can and will create outages.
Change control process must have management oversight and any change cannot pass without proper change advisory board approval. Only in this way, you can make sure that your environment will get the guaranteed SLA
Therefore you must confirm that the cloud vendor you're engaged with adheres to such processes.
Cloud Benefit #4: Proactive Maintenance by the Solutions Experts
Assuming you’d like to move into the cloud, one of the most important cloud benefits that you get out of such move is the proactive maintenance by the solution experts.
Obviously, this is if you choose that the vendor who developed the solution will also be the one that will host it, which is a major benefit, as no one is more expert on the solution than the ones that actually developed it.
Proactive maintenance doesn’t mean reviewing thresholds and errors, but actually making sure that those errors will not happen by using the latest best practices, carefully monitor the application and recognize any anomaly for addressing it immediately without any interference to the users, proactively monitors the logs to review any warnings and address those and much more.
Definitely this is something that will be very difficult to achieve without leveraging the most experts personnel.
Cloud Benefit #5: Pre-prod or Test Environments
There are a lot of variables that can create issues or outages to a production system, as described above, mainly around changes to the environment.
For making sure such changes do not affect the production, and such issue will not be found after hand, any change must be tested first on a pre-prod or test environment, and only then deploy the change to the production.
This should be a standard offering of your cloud vendor and critical for making sure your business is protected.
I do hope that this blog provided some meaningful insights and invite you to visit our cloud page and learn more on the solutions and offering we provide.