Creating Business Case for Cloud Storage

With cloud posing as a evolutionary concept aiding organizations to grow financially and make businesses more agile, many organizations have taken a step ahead to become a part of this transition. We all know the bunch of advantages cloud offers as opposed to its alternative traditional infrastructure. But unless you provide a clear idea on the returns and value of the investments to be made to upgrade existing hardware, it may seem that cloud doesn't make any financial sense.

When exploring cloud solutions, IT manager have to face the biggest challenge, which is IT cost. IT operators need to completely understand the business requirements and how efficiently they can invest on the migration and gain significant returns.

Here's a business case for cloud storage that should make all things seem yielding and constructive.

Determine the outlay of inefficiency

Not everything falls in place within an organization; there are some issues related to inefficiency. This inefficiency is costing company huge deal of money and thus, IT leaders need to get into the core and find out what is not working for the enterprise. In some cases, the amount lost due to business inefficiency results in millions of dollars and that is why you need to dig up the insights of the organization.

Financial argument

From a financial perspective, not all decision makers are definite to the real cost of managing their own IT environments. While the common and basic expenses such as human resources, hardware cost, maintenance agreements, software licensing and so on are counted in, IT leaders often overlook the additional overhead. This includes the need to update engineer certifications continually, non-recoverable downtime expenses, efficient use of finance such as using money for generating sales rather than investing on insignificant activities.

Understand business requirements

Of all, the most crucial part is to evaluate what exactly the business requires and how its needs can bring it all together. Figure out what is wrong, put forth a solution on how to fix the issue and justify why cloud is the ideal solution for the problem. That is what could lead IT managers to a successful business case because organizations are looking for a strong strategy that could help with reaping long-term benefits.

For that purpose, you'll require accurate information and details of the current status of the organization and a detailed information that demonstrates financial benefits of the migration. Ensure to make it an ideal and detailed plan that clearly justifies your business case.

Fit it all together

An organization, as a whole, needs to determine if migrating their entire traditional infrastructure to cloud will be an asset or not. Transitioning to cloud is not just about comparing the benefits of A to B, but they need to sit and spell out if cloud could bring in the advantages that were not possible the other way. For this, they need to specifically understand their business goals and objectives and give a thought to the point that if investing too much on non-core activities such as managing IT infrastructure would server their goals effectively or moving to a more efficient, scalable, flexible and cost-savings solution.

Nothing comes easily and while designing a business case for cloud storage, organizations will face a number of challenges throughout. But what can help here and ease the transition is doing business with the right cloud service provider.