3 Key Tips on Leveraging the Cloud for Growth

As the world moves towards an increasingly virtual future, new and emerging technologies have become the focus for many organisations.

The cloud is quickly becoming one of the most important technologies for modern organisations to look at as the future. However, it is essential to know how to utilise it to enable growth within your organisation.

Jumping headfirst into the world of cloud computing unprepared could lead to spending in places you don’t want to.

In this blog, we will review three essential tips on leveraging the cloud for growth within your organisation to ensure you can utilise the cloud properly to unlock your organisation’s full potential.

Tip 1: Choose the right cloud service provider.

The cloud provider you select will affect how you use your cloud deployment, the feature set available to you and, indeed, the cost of implementation.

Different providers will provide you with various services that may or may not be better for you, meaning it’s vital to become clued up on what other providers can give you.

There are a few different types of cloud services:

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): This provides you with infrastructure for a monthly payment, meaning that you can pay for computing and storage resources as a monthly cost over capital expenditure.

• Platform as a Service (PaaS): This environment gives you everything you need to build a cloud implementation, including tools and other pieces of software that will help you along the way.

• Software as a Service (SaaS): A single piece of software is provided as a service rather than a whole cloud infrastructure and implementation.

All of these different types of cloud services are useful for other organisations that have different needs. For example, suppose you only need the backbone of cloud infrastructure instead of a complete platform. In that case, IaaS might be more suitable for your organisation than paying for a complete PaaS package.

On top of this, there are a few different factors that might make some cloud providers more suitable than others —

• Reliability: Ensuring that you opt for a cloud provider that has a proven track record will ensure that you’re paying for a service that you can rely on, meaning that you can rest assured that your service will be available when you need it.

• Scalability: Scaling lets your organisation become more flexible and optimise easily, so ensuring that your provider provides an easily scalable service will help you in the long run.

• Security: Your information and your organisation’s data security are essential. Ensuring that your provider will look after your data securely with a proven track record will help you ensure that you won’t be open to attacks and breaches in the long run.

Tip 2: Optimize cloud costs.

While the cloud can have a lot of cost benefits for your organisation, it’s vital to ensure that you’re optimising your costs appropriately. Otherwise, you could be spending money in places you don’t need to, which may cancel out the cost savings of moving to the cloud.

Being conscious of your cloud implementation and needs is the best way to optimise cloud costs within your organisation. For example, knowing your needs will help you pick the right cloud plan, keep track of your usage, and scale your implementation accordingly.

Different providers give you different ways to manage your cloud costs. For example, some will only make you pay for what you use (known as a ‘pay as you go’ model), whereas others will require you to pay for a specific monthly allowance. By picking a plan that keeps your usage as optimised as possible, you can ensure that you’re not overspending.

Read our Cloud Cost Optimisation - How to manage rising cloud costs. | Aura Technology blog for a more in-depth view of this area.

Tip 3: Secure cloud data.

Your security is critical and valuable. By failing to consider security in your cloud implementation effectively, you leave yourself vulnerable to many attacks and breaches that could lead to your organisation losing lots of data and money, possibly leading to irreparable damage.

By investing in ways to secure your data and recover from a possible attack, you can protect your organisation and ensure it can prosper for a long time.

The first step is to encrypt all your data. This ensures that nobody can access it without an encryption key, meaning that it’s safe from anyone external trying to steal it. This is a barrier to those trying to sell your data to interested parties.

Another essential thing to do is back up your data and create a disaster recovery plan to ensure that you’re prepared in the case of a disaster and can get your organisation back up and running as fast as possible.

It would be best if you also looked at security policies and security controls within your cloud implementation to limit who can access it and change important information only to those who need to for their work, meaning that you can help restrict unauthorised access to your information and protect your organisation’s essential data.

Conclusion

The cloud is an essential technology for any organisation looking to take advantage of the best technology available, and these tips will let you ensure that your cloud implementation is helping your organisation grow and prosper. By accepting these tips on board, you can fully take advantage of the power of the cloud.

Suppose you want to start with cloud computing but don’t know how. Contact us today and our experts can help you every step of the way and will ensure your cloud implementation works for you.

Get in touch with us now and see how we can help.

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