More challenges, same budget. How does post-pandemic IT handle the cloud?

Many businesses accelerated their cloud strategies through 2020 and they plan to keep the momentum going. The cloud is vitally important during the post-pandemic world, but it also plays a central role in the digital transformation plans that are 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 expect the same from their employers. However, the challenge will be doing all of this when budgets remain tight.

Businesses increase cloud adoption

Our recent questionnaire of home-working experiences showed that businesses were planning to increase cloud adoption to position themselves for the challenges of the coming year. 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 cloud services need not be prohibitively expensive. Methodologies and technologies that were developed for companies on a scale of businesses like 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 hand on-premises, or maybe they increase revenue by allowing you to take on new tasks or do more of an existing one.

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.

The right partner is vital

For a company like Cloudhelix, for example, our job is to find the technology that will solve your problems. Our cloud-native thinking and experience across a range of sectors means that we can bring technologies that you might otherwise only get if you had a large budget to spend with a big cloud provider.

Bringing in the right partner can ensure that your cloud services are compatible. If you have a multi-cloud strategy, which is becoming increasingly common, then it is worth finding a partner who can provide ‘single pane of glass’ oversight of your cloud services.That enables you to identify problems quickly and understand exactly what you are using and when. Into all this has to be factored the need for security; as we have written in previous posts

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?