I’ve been talking cloud for years. Most of it was focused on simply removing unnecessary complexity from the world of IT and content management. Why setup servers, create networks, manage databases, or any other tedious, redundant, and valueless tasks?

When I say valueless, I am referring to the fact that managing a database does not bring any differentiating value to your organization. The value comes from the analysis of that data or through the leveraging the data to deliver better, more efficient, products and services to your client-base.

That still isn’t the greatest benefit or the cloud. Too many project spend a lot of time focused on sizing, performance, system compatibilities, and other technical details. That time would be better spent on designing and delivering the ideal solution to the client.

By moving to the cloud, those discussions are taken off of the table. Those conversations don’t exist. The higher up the cloud stack you move (IaaS => PaaS => SaaS), the more conversations focus upon how to better meet the needs of the organization.

Digital and Cloud

Everyone talks about going digital. Moving to the cloud is an absolute must for any digital transformation. It isn’t just a correlation, it is required. If you don’t go cloud, you will spend too much time keeping legacy systems working that you don’t have time to actually focus on how to move forward on the digital front.

Going cloud forces discipline on everyone. It brings the focus to how to best implement the solution and how the systems will work together. When dealing with system integration, the on-prem world often defaulted to “we’ll figure that out later” when later actually should have been yesterday.

In the cloud, integrations aren’t assumed. They have to be evaluated in-depth much sooner. This creates a better understanding how data needs to flow between systems, allowing people to work more effectively.

Make the Move

So yes. Move to the cloud to save on CapEx. Move to the cloud so you don’t have to pay an expensive network engineer. Move to the cloud so you don’t have to plan anymore software upgrades.

But also, move to the cloud to give you more time to decide how the software can address your challenges. Move to the cloud so thinking about how the systems work together becomes the first technical topic, not the last. Move to the cloud so that IT is left working exclusively on finding new technology that can solve problems, not keeping old technology afloat.

Move to the cloud so that the only job left is helping the business succeed.