Author: John McMahon

Read time: 10min

Business leaders are often drawn into a whirlwind of advertisements claiming the technical capability and benefits that new cloud-based technologies offer. While claims about the revolutionary capacity of the cloud are true, sometimes the real-world business advantages get lost in the advertiser’s messaging. Cloud hosting companies get so excited about what their technology can do, they forget the positive impact that it can have at the user level.

Let’s face it – Technology doesn’t benefit you unless the cost/benefit analysis shows you that it’s worth the investment. The true ROI of IronOrbit’s cloud solutions has to do with information technology that advances key priorities such as the following:

Productivity

Here’s the question that you should be asking: “If we move our IT processes into the cloud, will it help our employees work more effectively and more efficiently?” Hosted desktop solutions, like IronOrbit’s INFINITY Workspaces, come into vivid focus when it comes to productivity.

The internal processes of many companies are hampered by outdated computers and servers that are too slow or underpowered for the workflow required by their organizational objectives. Moving employees onto GPU-accelerated, cloud-based desktops provides superior computing power and speed. In addition, users have the ability to securely access their work from anywhere on any internet-connected device.

Mobile Forces

Wakefield Research shows that 69% of the employees regularly work remotely and 21% of them combine home and office environments. Reducing Complexity

Reducing Complexity

One of the strange laws of technology is: the more complex a system is to implement, the more it lowers the complexity of a company’s work processes. This is often due to the fact that systems that are tailored to specific workflows are more challenging to implement, and therefore more efficient.

A company with an on-premise IT infrastructure must contend with the cost factors below that add up to the total cost of ownership (and associated IT management complexity) of their system.

• Backups
• Computing
• Datacenter White Space
• Hardware
• Networking
• Operation & Management
• Software Licenses & Support
• Storage

Moving everything into the cloud eliminates the complexity of both the expenditures (moving to a flat-rate monthly payment) and IT management (85% of IT management is now done by the cloud provider in the data center environment). The final word on reducing complexity moves towards automation and integration. With IT assets in the cloud, integrations and process automation eliminate all the tedious manual processes.

Strengthening Security and Meeting Compliance Mandates

As you look across your industry, how many of your competitors can afford to hire a full team of cybersecurity professionals? Not many. The truth is that most companies are relying on their IT management team (either in-house or outsourced) to deal with IT security and compliance issues, such as SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI, FINRA, etc.

What’s wrong with that? Well, nothing – and everything.

While this was a good approach to securing IT assets ten years ago, the threats (and the stakes) to today’s IT environment are far too high for cybersecurity to be left to anyone but IT professionals that live in the cybersecurity space. This is where private cloud providers like IronOrbit shine. The primary mission of a data center is to protect your data in a way that is compliant with industry standards and legislative mandates; consequently, your cybersecurity is given the 24/7/365 attention that is required.

Keeping Your Options Open

If recent events have taught business leaders anything, it’s that having choices available to us is a good thing. Unfortunately, investing in on-premise servers, networks, computers, etc. locks you into the life cycle and limited capabilities of those assets. In contrast, cloud assets have innate flexibility that allows you to adjust to market fluctuations, and act quickly when you see a time-sensitive business opportunity.

In our last article, "Benefits of the IronOrbit Cloud", we talked about Moore’s Law. In a nutshell, Gordon Moore, CEO of Intel in 1965, said that technology was expanding its capability every two years, resulting in exponential technological growth. However, in 2010 we experienced a slowdown in technology, and business owners had an easier time keeping up for a few years. But Moore’s Law is about to kick back into action again in an unprecedented way with the introduction of 5G networks. 5G is going to be able to handle 20 times what your current 4G connection can carry. For the businesses that are in the cloud and are ready to take advantage of this enormous power boost, it means open doors for opportunity. But for companies still tied to on-site infrastructures, it means watching their competitors advance, while they desperately try to play catch up. Although many business leaders are not talking about it yet, 5G fueled by the lessons of COVID-19 is going to be the gamechanger that sets the course for this decade and beyond.