WHILE the pandemic’s impact has been mostly negative when it comes to digitalisation, the advancement of business technology has been a vital accelerator during that time.
As the regional manager at Zadara, a recognised leader in edge cloud services, I must say that the pandemic has forced what amounts to a multi-year leap in innovation and utilisation. Businesses large and small are now using tech to enhance its performance, capabilities, and reach.
Going digital has broken down barriers for business growth, enabling businesses to spread and scale more efficiently and more cost-effectively. Gone are the brick-and-mortar days where a business would require millions to expand globally or significantly scale up operations.
Today cloud technology has taken over and become an indispensable pillar of enterprise-grade companies especially those with presence throughout the globe. The cloud has reduced cost and increased efficiency in general. But when it comes to truly minimising investments and maximising returns, it is all about the type of cloud technology that you use.
As the cloud is so all-encompassing, different decision-makers tend to have different concepts and criteria when it comes to the ideal cloud approach for their business.
For instance, chief technology officers are often concerned about the latest technology, reliability, and ease of use. From the perspective of a chief information officer, they are most often focused on platform flexibility, capacity on-demand, and compatibility.
Meanwhile, CEOs typically emphasise overall cost, cashflow maximisation, time to market, and asset utilisation.
Lets take for example a recent case study of a leading regional financial institution. Realising the growing trend of digital banking, the company undertook a major transformation project to further digitalise their processes, systems and services.
As a rapidly growing industry player the institution needed a solution that offered the best of both worlds, accessible and highly scalable – to meet their rapid growth needs yet simultaneously cost-efficient and secure – to meet business and regulatory requirements.
Towards that end, the bank opted to proceed with a combined approach of public cloud and private cloud services – obtaining cloud-like, on-demand storage deployed at their premises.
From an investment standpoint, this allowed the bank to streamline cost with an operation expenditure (opex) focused pay per use only approach rather than a heavy upfront capital expenditure (capex) investment. This strategic decision also enabled the institution to meet data-intensive customer needs more quickly – cutting down process time from weeks to real time. This increased efficiency has in turn led to increasing customer growth.
Businesses need to exert maximum control over one of the most crucial aspects when it comes to scaling up: the opex. Flexible and highly customised cloud solutions enables businesses to only pay for what they use. This helps minimise opex and avoid major upfront capex.
Other key factors to consider when scaling include capacity on-demand, a solid uptime guarantee, and multi-cloud support as they represent key scalability elements that will smoothen the transition.
The coming years will not just be about businesses scaling and expanding. Enterprise and managed service providers will also not only see the need to expand but be able to do so through more cost-effective and instantaneous methods.
Whether you are a business in its infancy looking to scale locally, a thriving enterprise looking to go global, or even a managed service provider looking to expand its market, one thing is certain – the right cloud tech approach could be the difference between a cost-effective, efficient and successful endeavour and failure. So choose wisely. – Oct 28, 2021
LindSay Lim is the regional sales manager of Zadara.
The views expressed are solely of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Focus Malaysia.
