More Challenges, Same Budget. How Does IT Achieve More with Less?

Many businesses accelerated their cloud strategies through 2020 and they plan to keep the momentum going. The cloud is vitally important to the future of business, especially post-pandemic, but it also plays a central role in the digital transformation plans that are already part of most businesses’ long-term strategy. 

The opportunity to increase cloud adoption and further the digitisation of business processes is too good to pass up. Customers expect a faster, more personalised experience from business, and employees now expect the same from their employers. However, the challenge will be doing all of this when budgets remain tight. 

Businesses Increase Cloud Adoption

Our study of home-working experiences showed that businesses were planning to increase cloud adoption to position themselves better for the future. However, a significant majority (62%) said their IT budget has remained the same, so they will have to find ways to do more with the same resources. 

The good news is that, used in the right way, cloud services don’t need to be prohibitively expensive. Methodologies and technologies that were developed for companies operating at the scale of Netflix are trickling down to SMEs. The challenge is to identify the ones that are worth investing in.

Perhaps they can save you money elsewhere by replacing functions that you currently handle on-premises, or maybe they increase revenue by allowing your team to take on more business-critical work.

More than half of respondents (53%) say that they turn to an expert partner when they don’t have in-house knowledge for an IT project. That can be a good strategy for cloud services, given the breadth and depth of knowledge, skills and experience that’s required. The complexity of the cloud makes it very difficult to manage everything in-house. 

The Right Partner is Vital

Our aim at Ekco is to put the right technology and people in place to solve your problems. It’s not technology for technology’s sake – with cloud-native thinking at our core and specialists local to your business who know and understand your challenges, we can find creative ways to consolidate and centralise costs, enabling you to achieve more without increasing spend. n 

For this to work, you need a cloud partner, not just a provider, and the right partner at that. As multi-cloud strategies become increasingly common, it’s crucial you find a partner who can provide a consistent management layer across your estate to ensure oversight of all services and data.

This will enable your provider to take more ownership of your estate, proactively monitoring your workloads and bringing fixes before you are even aware there are problems. Adopting more cloud technology brings so many benefits, but it will require a change in thinking when it comes to management, something a provider with holistic expertise, like Ekco, can enable.

Businesses can get the cloud services they need, even when budgets are tight, but it requires a sound strategy. What’s your strategy for increasing your cloud adoption as the world recovers from the pandemic? Get in touch with us today to learn how we can help you achieve more with less.