What the cloud-smart model is and what companies must do to achieve it

After one year of cloud adoption exponential growth, businesses that aim to continue taking advantage of this technology -to maintain their competitive edge- need to enhance their perspective and turn to a cloud-smart model — a natural and necessary outcome of the cloud massive migration, accelerated by the pandemic. 

In fact, COVID-19 allowed many companies to confirm those benefits the cloud had been promising for years: cost control, unlimited scalability and flexibility, the possibility of accessing data and applications anytime, anywhere, and from any device; increasingly lower latency thanks to the evolution of connectivity technologies and a gradually higher deployment, and, most importantly, the key agility to guarantee business continuity under any circumstance (including, as it turned out, the most complex ones). 

Although many companies saw themselves forced to resort to the cloud out of necessity or obligation, persistent good outcomes were key in their decision of developing a strategic vision: this is why it is not surprising that the market consultant IDC detected that in the post-pandemic world 90% of organizations will work under a cloud-first scheme. This means that what is and is not uploaded to the cloud is no longer evaluated, the business itself is based on this technology instead. The same consulting firm determined that only in Latin America cloud infrastructure growth will take place across all segments this year: 29.4% in Infrastructure as a Service; 36.9% in Platform as a Service; and 19.9% in Software as a Service. 

In this maturity growth, the multi-cloud idea becomes increasingly stronger. Why limit yourself to having everything in a single private cloud or hire a public cloud when you can select multiple clouds, each according to their area of greatest experience or best performance? Thus, if one cloud provider is a storage expert, and another in application performance, you can get the best of each. A multi-cloud strategy provides several benefits: from total flexibility to whole workload optimization, including cost-benefit streamlining. 

One thought applicable to any cloud data migration is making sure that long-term business needs will be considered. Limiting growth by stagnation due to a poor cloud provider choice, makes no sense. Organizations can bring specific workloads to a platform or move them where they can leverage the best pricing and terms agreed for certain requirements. Additionally, a simultaneous cloud access approach also facilitates a smooth transfer and an almost instant shift between clouds, should you need to switch providers for any reason whatsoever. 

Companies are now facing this possibility of scaling to the next level and leverage the cloud to differentiate themselves in the marketplace. Having an expert’s support knowledgeable of how to analyze opportunities, segregate needs, assess return on investment (ROI) and choose the best ways of implementation to assure that  services will be executed optimally, without unnecessary expenses or hires is essential along this pathway. Thus, a new milestone will be conquered: being a cloud-smart company.