Cloud Done Right

Whether you deliver cloud services yourself or through a third party, there are three considerations that must be examined in order to effectively monetize the cloud and deliver the level of stability, redundancy and security that each customer requires.

Mission-critical, or cost saving and convenient?

How does each cloud service fit into your customer’s business? There’s a huge difference between mission-critical services like web-based retail, point of sale (POS) and fleet management applications and cost savers like hosted internal social networking. Furthermore, cloud product classes are weighed differently for each customer: cloud services that are primarily a convenience for some companies, like unified communications and collaboration (UC&C), are absolutely critical for others.

Before the finer points of a cloud service are examined, the way in which that service impacts a particular customer must be outlined. Similarly, the scale of the solution is important to consider. Delivering Netflix to millions of users from the cloud is very different from delivering a point-of-sale app to a 50-person retail team. To effectively monetize the cloud, each service must be customizable.

The more mission-critical a system is, the more concern IT executives express regarding a move to the cloud. Notice in figure 2 that enterprise cloud customers have a clear preference for the types of services they anticipate moving to the cloud.

Source: Claranet