What is the business value of the cloud?

People often talk of the short-term business value of the cloud, such as an increased level of digitalisation and manual processes being more easily automated. But what is the long-term commercial value? In this blog, we’ll take a look at how and why the cloud represents major business value.

Here are five areas where cloud solutions increase your long-term commercial value:

1. Better control of IT costs

According to a survey from Radar, businesses with mature cloud solutions have 20% lower operating IT costs. One example of a cost-efficient solution is to use the cloud service provider’s resources instead of purchasing expensive systems and hiring internal IT resources. You can also use scalable subscription models and only pay for what is used. It also makes it easy to upscale or downscale according to your needs. The result is that you don’t need to have a high level of IT expertise on site, as maintenance and updates are handled externally by your cloud provider.

2. Easier to plan and greater scalability

One of the major changes with using the cloud is that IT services become pure capacity services. This means that IT departments can spend less time planning and allocating resources to those parts of the delivery that are cloud services, yet still benefit from the latest technology and security. Greater opportunities are also created to quickly upscale or downscale operational and storage needs to suit you when your needs change. This frees up your time to focus on creating growth rather than maintenance of operations. It also spares many IT managers headaches and allows for resources that can instead focus on creating innovation.

3. Mobility + Flexibility = Collaborative efficiency

The cloud enables mobility, which in turn opens up opportunities for greater and better collaboration. When employees can access their work processes, wherever they are, conditions improve for internal efficiency. There are a vast number of cloud-based tools and applications that help businesses to collaborate efficiently. The effect is that employees communicate more easily and share information more quickly with each other through collaborative platforms. And right now, we are seeing how companies all over the world are giving their employees the opportunity for more mobile work, which not only increases freedom and internal efficiency, but also contributes to more satisfied employees and makes you a more attractive employer.

4. Business continuity

When data and information are stored in the cloud, it is easier to protect and restore compared with when data is stored locally. And when your information is backed up and protected in a secure place, you will easily be able to access your data and do business as usual, which minimises the risk of any operational disruption and loss of productivity. It is, however, important to be aware that this is not something that is done automatically in the public cloud, but either you yourself or your cloud service provider needs to make sure that backups are run on an ongoing basis.

5. Innovation

The cloud creates totally new opportunities for innovation and applications. Open architecture, shorter development cycles, scalability and industry-specific cloud solutions give a boost to innovation and offer a greater chance for growth. The flexible architecture in the cloud can be constantly updated and adapted according to your business goals, creating both resistance and resilience. But it requires you to have a clear cloud strategy and a partner that is familiar with you and can update the architecture according to your needs.

Move closer to the power of the cloud

Every day, most Swedish IT organisations face growing demands and expectations when it comes to the level of digitalisation. Furthermore, solutions implemented must correlate with the business’s objectives and the effect being targeted, while the scope to act is limited by the constant presence of a focus on cost.

At Nordlo, we have extensive experience of cloud solutions and have helped many different businesses, organisations and public sector bodies to move all or some of their IT environment into the cloud.