Getting a Return on Investment from your Cloud

Reality Check: Being on the Cloud Doesn’t Always Mean Sky-High ROI

So, your business is on the cloud and the general perception is that now workflows will get more streamlined, revenues will pick-up and client engagement will become better. However, just buying into a cloud subscription does not guarantee instant results or an impressive ROI. Performing in the cloud is a process that needs to be optimized for better results. You need to leverage your cloud investments with strategy to ensure the emerging model connects better with digital savvy consumers and in-house employee teams apart from raising the bottomline.

Cost efficiencies realized via Cloud is No Longer the BIG Engagement Factor

The cloud-enabled workplace is no longer an anomaly. It has been embraced by business managers and consumers across the world. You need to get over the idea that realizing cost efficiency is the sole objective of having a cloud infrastructure. There is much more to the cloud story and its range of benefits exceeds the most apparent advantages. Emerging benefits include:

  • Making workforces more independent, self-sufficient and mobile
  • Better tracking interactions with existing and prospective customers
  • Making data easier to interpret, more actionable to drive decisions
  • Providing insight to overhaul business models
  • Easily shifting to global service delivery platforms

Changing Perceptions When Approaching the Cloud

Expectations from the cloud have changed drastically from 2012 when improving cost efficiencies was the primary reason for adopting the cloud

Organizations need to approach their cloud as an evolutionary process. They can use it as a catalyst for improving legacy processes, realigning work patterns and re-analyzing consumer data to raise their threshold for entering unexplored or high-risk marketplaces. Today, the Cloud is about business transformation and not just business improvements. Agility, collaboration and creating new customer delivery models are more important to CEOs and CIOs.

The cloud is non-conformist and disruptive—just what your business needs to carve a new identity & create new consumer engagement channels in a transformational digital era

Why you need to rethink the cloud?

Cloud offers the most scalable business model, fast-tracks work via self-service computing interfaces and allows room to integrate internal applications with external applications. Organizations require this type of AGILITY—using cloud as the primary delivery model. From testing waters in emerging IT trends or driving business innovation, you can put the cloud to work, assured that its elasticity will provide plenty of room for decision-makers to reassess and reorganize. This includes more speed-to-market solutions and centralization of data. This takes us to the next stage in our discussion—CLOUD MATURITY.

No More Cloud Amateurs: How companies are employing Cloud Transformations in 2015?

Cloud applications are at the forefront of cloud infrastructure adoption trends, geared to cross $130 billion in revenue by 2020

The cloud is emerging as a transformative solution for organizations ready to look beyond standard service packages peddled by cloud solution providers. Examples include:

  • Reducing infrastructure load – rather than ramping-up internal IT infrastructures, businesses are migrating application development and testing to the cloud
  • Meeting business partners in the cloud – as more business partners adopt the cloud, conventional communication is changing into inter-cloud interactions. This allows companies to maintain their leadership role without physical set-ups or interactions along with maintaining stringent data accessibility features
  • Monetizing Data – silos of internal data is being filtered, indexed and systematically routed to the most relevant department, ensuring monetization of legacy data is accomplished
  • Assisting BYOD culture – as employees continue to work beyond conventional office set-ups and irregular  hours, cloud-based applications ensure easier teamwork without compromising privacy of business data

Understanding Evolving Cloud Environment with Examples

Example 1: Using Cloud for Driving Engagement in Healthcare

Businesses are creating customer-focused cloud solutions that help them serve customers better and decipher their expectations. Digitally savvy customers are not averse to interacting with service providers via the cloud. The healthcare sector is a great example to quote here—chronically ill patients need daily lifestyle management. For this, healthcare providers are investing in cloud applications that enable real-time patient monitoring. This type of patient care makes the caregivers look more responsible. This type of holistic post-operative care raises the caregiver’s credentials from a business perspective too.

Example 2: Using Cloud for Decreasing New Hiring Learning Curves

An interesting impact of cloud-enabled mobility is optimizing the new employee orientation processes. Usually, boardroom meetings and training sessions present a longer onboarding process. The cloud can leverage this with smarter solutions. Using mobile solutions, onboarding can be initiated via smarter, digital inputs. Hired personnel can be prepped about workplace protocols and real-time scenarios. This type of premature employee engagement ensures that hands-on training durations are restricted. New employees come aboard with some degree of familiarity with their reporting managers and expected outcomes.

Example 3: Using Cloud for Gathering Real-time Product Performance Data

Social media conversations and customer reviews are reasonably good indicators for judging the performance of your services or products. However, there is another way to do this—the Cloud way. Manufacturers who are big on innovation cannot wait for issues to arise and escalations to show up on their Facebook or Twitter pages. They need a more intuitive solution that gives them real-time performance indicators. Developing mobile applications via the cloud, manufacturers allow consumers to feed performance data on a daily or weekly basis. This is very different from Apps launched for supermarket customers. We are talking about technical diagnostic numbers that only skilled users can interpret and upload. This eases evaluating product performance and fine-tuning specifications. For manufacturers testing their latest offerings, these findings can lead to emphatic changes.

These are just a few examples of how the Cloud is stimulating business transformations. Watch this space as we bring more discussion to the table, unbiased views about emerging cloud trends…!

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