Think cloud for your business in 2022

Great guest piece by Ed Ronayne, Head of Technology Strategy and Solutions at Welltel

The pandemic has changed the idea of the workplace with the widespread shift to remote and hybrid working. This has impacted the IT strategy of every organisation, and the move to the cloud has seen risk averse businesses such as finance switch from an on-premise model to a cloud-first approach. It’s an evolution into a new digital age of innovation. New wireless communications advances, such as 5G R16 and R17, will require even more widespread cloud adoption. Some 75% of organisations globally have adopted cloud services in some fashion. The argument is no longer why; but when?

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is gaining market traction as it allows IT departments to migrate physical services to the cloud. By renting computing and storage capacity from a cloud vendor, businesses no longer have to buy, install, or run servers – or be concerned about datacentre buildings and electrical installations. This is more important than ever as Eirgrid recently notified datacentre operators that they would not be providing connections to new Dublin-area facilities until at least 2028 due to compression on the system.

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) will also be a real game-changer as it enables developers to build revolutionary new features, services, and products for their customers. PaaS works well for large or small businesses because it is cost effective, allowing smaller organisations access to state-of-the-art resources without the cost implication. PaaS provides a path for accelerating software development which will truly be the next era in digital transformation.

Choosing the right cloud platform vendor for your needs is crucial to an organisation’s success and enlisting the support of a managed service provider can offer security for your data and applications, on-hand technical support, scalability to suit evolving requirements, and ensure resilience in the case of an incident or outage.

How have perceptions of the cloud changed?

In the recent past, many businesses were slow to adopt cloud technologies. Cloud migration was perceived as something that only larger companies could achieve. Now, cloud computing is no longer a catchphrase but is an integral part of any IT strategy – for all businesses, across all industries.

In 2020, six out of 10 businesses around the world moved more work to the cloud, accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic. This trend is likely to continue in the coming years, as 46% of companies reported better return on costs. The three sectors that plan to spend the most on cloud computing services are manufacturing ($19.7 billion), professional services ($18.1 billion), and banking ($16.7 billion).

It’s also interesting to note that many cloud products and platforms have become verbs in the last two years – we all “Google” things, but we now use the words “Zoom” and “Teams” as terms for calling.

What cloud service is right for you?

There are several different types of cloud computing architecture used to deploy resources in the cloud: public, private, hybrid and multicloud.

With a public cloud model, on-demand computing services and infrastructure are managed by a third-party provider and shared with multiple users on the public internet via platforms such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services (AWS). A private cloud, also known as an internal or corporate cloud, is an environment in which all hardware and software resources are dedicated exclusively to, and accessible only by, a single customer. Hybrid cloud involves mixing public and private cloud services with on-premise infrastructure which allows orchestration between platforms, while multicloud is the use of multiple cloud computing and storage services in a single mixed architecture.

Given that cloud has become a key tool in solving companies’ sudden need to become distributed and hybrid, IT buyers are now looking to purchase non-server processing resources in the same secure scale up / scale down manner across the technology stack. For Welltel, this ranges from phone systems to cloud contact centres, standard internet access to hybrid Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) or Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SDWAN) solutions, and from Audio Visual or Mobile Device Management (MDM) to solutions with integrated Security Operations Centre (SOC) and Security Incident Event Management (SIEM) capabilities.

Over time, business needs change which means a company’s cloud strategy needs to adapt. This may result in transitioning your private cloud to be a part of a hybrid cloud or adapting to new application or workload requirements.

This is where managed service providers can add value through extensive service ranges – from configuration management to security. This know-how takes away the stress of managing IT infrastructure and assets, which reduces costs and allows resources to be re-focused on business growth and development. The future of business is in the cloud.

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