Roshan Teeluck, Partner Program Manager, OVHcloud Americas
The pandemic has drastically changed how consumers and businesses are operate globally, especially in North America. Businesses who have successfully adapted are those who were already, or quickly started, their digital journey.
If an organization wants to survive and still be in business in 2022 and beyond, they have no choice but to embrace a digital transformation strategy leveraging the power of the cloud, which has huge opportunities for partners and resellers. Not only will the cloud provide value-added services, software and technical support, but it could also become a trusted advisor to customers.
Below are four key factors that need to be taken into consideration both by customers and partners.
Business Benefits and Risks
CEOs want to innovate quickly to maximize shareholder value while minimizing the risks associated with any changes that will impact their businesses.
The pandemic is forcing most IT executives to re-adapt their business models if they want to survive. From public to private sectors entities, being able to provide products and services remotely and online have been key for organizations to continue to remain relevant. These have come at a cost with the risks of losing data at all the different migration stages and all security aspects of network, data and applications being hosted on the cloud. Do organizations have all the resources to plan and execute the project of overhauling all their on-premise to the cloud? Not necessarily.
Partners can become a trusted advisor and guide customers to define a business case and clearly specify goals. Building the case to migrate to the cloud includes not only calculating the cost-efficiency of the project over a defined period, but also showing to stakeholders this will bring an improvement to productivity.
CEO and CFO Benefits
However strong the business case presented by the IT department, if the CEO and CFO are not convinced this will benefit the organization’s finances, there is little chance of getting the budget to even start a cloud project.
CFOs are often skeptics when it comes to spending based on the promise of savings and will primarily ask these questions: What is the Return on Investment (ROI), what is the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and how do you compare the ROI and TCO of moving to the cloud as compared to a traditional on-premise/hybrid solution? Are the risks (business, financial and operational) of moving IT to the cloud worth the benefits?
The answer is yes, and it could be immediate. Imagine that your website traffic spikes and your company starts raking in orders because a social media campaign went viral. If you were still on a traditional on-premise solution, there would have been no flexibility. A cloud-based solution offers agility for the company’s IT department.
Partners presenting a data-centric approach on ROI and TCOs maximize their chances of winning projects, specifically if the pricing is predictable with no hidden costs over a period of time.
Data Security, Sovereignty and Confidentiality
Data sovereignty laws have a direct impact on how CEOs view their data collection, processing, and storage. While companies undergo audits asking where data is exactly located, they also are questions about the details of cloud service providers (cloud vendors) and their data practices.
Partners should be able to re-assure their customers that the cloud vendor they are working with is transparent and can be trusted to handle their data.
Pricing and Billing
A survey at the Gartner Symposium indicated as much as 95 per cent of business and IT leaders say cloud billing is the most confusing part of public cloud adoption. Customers want to have greater price transparency, be able to calculate their cloud expenditure and predict future costs.
As pricing models differ from one cloud vendor to another, it is very important for partners to have a deep understanding of how the pricing is structured when they are providing a proposal to their customers. The pricing models provided by cloud vendors should be transparent, predictable and have no hidden fees with a clear path towards adding options and no surprise extra billing at month’s end.
Some cloud vendors will charge you for incoming or outgoing network traffic and this will impact the fees customers are charged. Partners also need to ensure their customers are not locked-in with proprietary technologies and this may prove expensive when they want to migrate out.
Cloud vendors have become key suppliers in operating critical assets for customers. Gartner predicts cloud costs to make up 14.2 per cent of the total global enterprise IT spending market in 2024. This is a huge market for partners and resellers as companies evolve towards a multi-cloud environment.
Partners will need to work with cloud vendors to differentiate themselves on who will support them by providing a highly-secured environment with the best market price/performance ratio. They need to partner with a cloud vendor who, uses non-proprietary open-source technologies (open stack), own their infrastructure, and provide the highest level of security. A cloud vendor that can provide the best price/ratio while not compromising the quality of service and support with a growing ecosystem of partners worldwide.
Source : OVHcloud
