How to drive your Boss to adopt the Cloud
You have been studying the cloud by reading loads of articles on the pros and cons of moving a business to the cloud. You probably monitor your competition, and as a matter of fact, some of them have already adopted the cloud. Some more – some less. You are clearly thinking that the cloud is the future of computing and off-premise data storage – either Big Data, or simple small corporate data. So how do you convince your Boss to adopt the cloud? Surely you will get tons of questions you will have to answer to present the whole aspect of your idea.
Surely you will hear questions which are based on rumours or some knowledge acquired by reading abstract articles about the cloud. You wouldn’t want to start presenting your plan without proper preparation, a clear schedule and all the answers your boss might ask, because the risk of quickly being shot down is rather high.
Here are some facts you should keep in mind when selling your Boss the move to the cloud.
Stay ahead of arguments
The cloud is a buzzword for a decade now, highly used by marketing specialists with an obvious target – to increase the usage of cloud services. The target has been reached and the cloud is being adopted by home and corporate users at an enormous rate.
Recent surveys by a cloud portfolio management company show that 96% [1] of companies are running cloud based applications or use cloud storage in some form, and 92% [1] of these use the public cloud for deploying applications.
Your boss might argue that only large corporations can afford the move to the cloud, but you may crash this opinion easily by presenting a report from Rackspace, in which they state that companies with less than 20 employees are more likely to adopt the cloud than large enterprises (1000+ employees), or even the mid sized companies of around 500 employees. The cloud is simply for all companies and for all sizes of companies - that’s why it is largely adopted.
Cost management of cloud applications
Surely your boss will argue, “The cloud is too expensive for us”, to which you should answer with: “We can’t afford not to adopt the cloud”. Simply think of the obvious benefits of the cloud, such as the downsizing of IT resources, the overall cap cost and operating costs, which are just some of the financial benefits of the cloud.
In most companies’ redundancy and resilience play also a substantial role in cost management. Most of the times “just in case” backup hardware adds a substantial cost to running the business. So by looking at the perspective of just paying for what you use, and having the “just in case” available at your finger tip makes more sense than having the backup hardware physically in your server room.
What happens is that a cloud management company takes on the risk by managing resources which are used by multiple companies at the same time, which is a dual win-win situation.
Making good use of resources
In the cloud resources are scalable on demand. Higher demand - scale up, lower demand – scale down. New applications can definitely lure your boss out in the open. Bring in the buzz word BYOD (Bring your own device). Your boss will love the idea that employees will use their own devices when taking work home or gaining access to company resources with their own device, whether this will be a smart phone or a laptop computer. Bottom line – productivity will skyrocket!
Cloud is secure
There are 2 sides to security, undeniably, cloud companies are interesting in securing their assets, as you are. With strong Data Protection rules applied to companies by legislators, Cloud Providers act in their own interest securing your assets. A major argument is also that “SysAdmins” belong to the past, and Cloud Provider internal Staff manage operations securely.
Attracting fresh talent
Are you transforming your company to attract the emerging millennial or Generation X workforce? Millennials work different than the old guys. They want the ability to collaborate anytime - anywhere. They want to meet and work with colleagues from anywhere and at any time of day or night. They will want to share files, access code repositories, documents or whatever else they work on - online. Sometimes they might need to work from home, or while on a train or airplane. Only the cloud can offer these benefits of being future ready and meet the demands of the future workforce.
Forbes predicted in 2013 that,
By 2025, millennials will account for 75% of the global workforce and by next year, they will account for 36% of the American workforce.
If your business has a tech background, moving to the cloud today is a solid decision. Being able to offer your employees cloud collaboration and communication tools may very well be the key to your company’s survival or continued growth.
Well, now that you have the facts on how to convince your boss, go to “doubting Thomas” and open up your broad arsenal of reasonings and start convincing him. There’s no way you’ll leave without a resounding “yes – let’s move to the cloud”
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