Savings are only the start of the cloud’s value

The costs of cloud computing—really, the lower costs of cloud computing versus on-premises systems—seem to be the focus of enterprises.

But many enterprises find there is much more value to be found in the public cloud than cost savings alone.

Take the case of a midsized tire manufacturer. It spends millions to move to the public cloud to reduce IT costs by 30 percent. Once migrated, it discovers these additional values from the cloud:

• The ability to speed time-to-market.There’s no longer any waiting for hardware and software to be procured and configured, which can takes months. Instead, IT can spin up servers needed to support a new product line in hours or add capacity to accommodate expanding the business.
• The ability to deal with near-perfect information. Moving to the cloud typically means consolidating enterprise data. In doing so, you can understand much more about past patterns in the business and use that to better extrapolate the future of the business. In the case of the example tire company, it understands how to change what tires are manufactured in a year, based on buying patterns over the last several years. Although predictive analytics has been around for a while, it didn’t become affordable until cloud computing came along.
• The ability to go digital to the last mile.There is a lot of talk these days about digital enablement. The public cloud provides a platform for digital enablement that’s both quick to build and dirt-cheap. That tire company can now do inventory automatically using RFID and send delivery trucks optimized routes before they leave the warehouse.

The problem with strategic cost savings is that enterprise management needs to experience it themselves and learn how to change their businesses around the use of cloud computing (or any beneficial technology, for that matter).

It’s great that the tactical cost savings are a sufficient motivation for migrating to the cloud. But don’t stop there once you have migrated. There’s so much more value for you to gain once you’re on the cloud.