|
Growth strategies for product, marketing, sales and support
Telephony was born in the Cloud. Your grandparent's first phone call took place in a cloud, the Public Switched Telephone Network or PSTN. That secure email you just sent, over the Internet, the cumulonimbus of clouds. PSTN and the Internet are the foundations the Cloud is built on. Today we have Software as a Service in the Cloud, Infrastructure as a Service in the Cloud and of course X as a Service in the Cloud. Why? Because Metcalf’s law still rules, a network’s value expands exponentially with each node attached. Broadband and processing power to cost ratios are following Moore’s law to the letter. Even governments have learned it was too expensive to build their own telephone and data services. Are Cloud services secure? Ashley Madison might have been an X as a Service but not a very well secured X on their servers. Target’s credit card database was on premise. Blue Cross and Blue Shield data sat on servers in their data centers. Harvard University, had their on premise systems hacked in July. The US Office of Personnel Management had over 21 million government employee records exposed. But what about the Cloud providers? In the list of top breaches over the past 5 years, thus far, the SaaS or IaaS providers were absent.1 Missing from the list; Salesforce.com, Cisco WebEx, Marketo, Oracle, Google, Amazon, ATT, Rackspace, and the list goes on. Aren’t hackers probing them? You bet. The difference is operating XaaS means security is core and mission critical to their business; they understand a breach could mean death to their revenues. They have serious certifications driven by processes and tools that Ashley Madison most likely never dreamt of. There is no reason to fear the Cloud from a security standpoint, not if you ask the right questions and take the right approach. Just ask the CIA... Your fear of the Cloud could still be rational beyond security measures. Why? Because innovation taking place in the Cloud may disrupt your revenues and profits. Competitors are using Cloud based capabilities to rapidly accumulate and analyze data in ways not thought of before; from securing their operations to deploying new features for interacting with suppliers, partners and customers. Analytical capabilities available in the Cloud far out strip most organization’s spreadsheet on premise driven activities today. For small and medium sized organizations, Google Analytics, when properly used, can improve lead generation and conversion, driving revenues. Scaling up to a large enterprise, analytics from SalesForce.com, when properly designed and deployed can also improve lead generation, qualification, conversion and renewal. Oh, and you can get the analysis pushed to your mobile device. Healthcare and manufacturing organizations are rolling out technology updates every two weeks leveraging Cloud based Dev/Ops processes. Gone are the days of the big releases where vendors sent your organization 17 CD’s to upload or hardware companies required you to replace monitors or drilling components. Today’s software driven, Cloud enabled, technology releases look more like what comes over your smartphone, enhancements every two weeks. Can your organization do that? Successful Cloud strategies reduce operational risk and improve your ability to compete and disrupt. Our recommendation is to start navigating the Cloud with a Core/Context approach. Leverage some Cloud capabilities that improve and reduce costs of context activities like payroll, benefits administration, or facilities management. Once you’ve got those mastered, select one core, non-mission critical activity to be managed by one very competent Cloud provider; analytics that you don’t have in house for key data that may be a game changer.  GE seems to agree, Jim Fowler their CIO has been tasked to improve productivity by $1Bn leveraging the Cloud.2 Leveraging a core context strategy, Fowler says, "We're going to build things that differentiate us. I'm going to build that and buy the rest."
Rational experiments become easier to execute in the Cloud. Opportunities to develop new capabilities without disrupting current processes or hitting constraints with current IT systems or platforms are today's reality. That’s why even the United States Central Intelligence Agency is moving to the Cloud.3 Last year the CIA awarded Amazon Web Services with a $600MM contract to deploy Amazon Web Services behind the CIA’s very thick defenses. The CIA expects to leverage economies of scale from the commercial world leveraging developers who can drive innovation faster with rational experiments, even though the CIA’s Cloud is well defended. Today your organization has more to fear from the Cloud than ever before. Ascendiosa is helping organizations navigate through the Cloud, identifying, quantifying and realizing value on the flight path. Co-Author: John Sifonis is a board member of StrataThought, frequent keynote speaker and author of the best selling book “Net Ready". 1 http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/worlds-biggest-data-breaches-hacks/ 2-Oct-2015 2 CIO Insight, Mike Vizard, GE CIO Is Tasked With Driving $1B in Gains http://www.cioinsight.com/print/it-strategy/cloud-virtualization/ge-cio-is-tasked-with-driving-1b-in-gains.html 11/3/2015 3 CIA off and Running With Amazon Web Services, June 2014, http://www.cio.com/article/2375269/hybrid-cloud/cia-off-and-running-with-amazon-web-services.html 11/5/2015 Comments are closed.
|
RSS Feed