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In recent weeks, we’ve been hearing many of the same questions from clients, as the core focus of IT leaders changes, post-COVID. How can we be better for our customers? How can we use technology to make our customers’ lives easier? How can we gain a competitive advantage through technologies that improve customer-centricity?
In answering these and other questions, most companies inherently understand the value of delivering digital-first experiences to consumers. Yet bringing these solutions to market in a timely manner often requires a greater degree of flexibility than on-premises architecture can provide.
This is especially problematic as recent study shows that 90% of technology leaders surveyed “fear competitive displacement if they fail to keep pace with digital innovation”.
Cloud transformation makes it possible to meet the ever-changing needs of both customers and internal users—and keep costs low—while staying ahead of the competition through innovation and the rapid delivery of new features and products.
So how exactly does a cloud GTM strategy help to accelerate your time-to-market? While this list isn’t comprehensive, the following are 10 key advantages to consider:
Compared with on-prem architectures, cloud environments can be spun up much more quickly, at the click of a button. This time-savings over waiting for hardware to be brought in and configured makes it possible for teams to get to work and bring their work to market more quickly.
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools integrate easily into cloud environments. As a result, product teams can gain access to important functionality needed to bring new solutions to market without custom application development (or traditional, expensive software licensing arrangements that require ongoing updates and renewals).
One of the major benefits of adopting cloud computing is that cloud solutions are responsible for maintaining their own infrastructures. Not only does this minimise ongoing support requirements for IT teams, it ensures they’ll have access to the latest technologies—given competition amongst Australia’s major cloud providers, it’s in their best interests to stay up-to-date.
Consequently, teams working within cloud environments are more likely to have access to the ‘latest and greatest’ technology, giving them a strategic advantage over others and facilitating a faster go-to-market.
While it is technically possible to utilise continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) practices within on-prem environments, doing so is much simpler in the cloud. Thanks to the cloud’s instant access to computing power, teams can run CI/CD tasks simultaneously in order to deploy new releases and updates to the market more quickly.
Moving from on-prem architecture to the cloud offers a number of financial benefits, including the ability to offload some or all of your infrastructure costs to cloud providers and to limit spending to the resources you actually use (versus those you think you might need).
Furthermore, transitioning from upfront CAPEX investments to the pay-as-you-go billing model of the cloud smooths out IT spending, making it easier to fund and go to market quickly with customer-facing technologies and improvements.
The dynamic nature of the cloud makes responding to changing resource demands seamless.
Whereas on-prem architecture requires the purchase of extra capacity to respond to potential usage spikes, cloud architectures can instantly reallocate resources to accommodate fluctuations and release them as the demand wanes. This elasticity makes getting to market faster possible and reduces upfront costs.
Similarly, because organisations leveraging cloud computing are able to respond dynamically to changing requirements, the risk of incidents impacting customers’ experience is reduced.
For instance, if a cloud architecture is able to automatically allocate more storage to a database, both outages and down-time can be reduced. Not only does this improve customer satisfaction and retention, it minimises GTM delays that take staff away from production work.
It’s not uncommon for IT teams to spend most of their time on the support activities required to keep the lights on, rather than those that actually advance the company’s competitive advantage.
Because cloud computing enables easier process automation—both on the IT team and across entire organisations—team members’ time can be redirected to more strategic initiatives, such as getting new products, features, or updates to market before competitors.
The COVID-19 pandemic has proven the power of cloud computing to support collaboration across distributed teams. Whether teams remain remote or not, the ability to work seamlessly from multiple locations makes shared work on new innovations and entering new markets easier.
Finally, it’s important to note that the data security, governance, and data solutions enabled by the cloud generally outpace an on-premise solution.
Many organisations have long expressed hesitancy over cloud security. However, today’s cloud providers are held to strict security standards and are better resourced to implement best-in-class security measures than individual businesses.
For companies that must meet compliance and regulatory requirements before going to market, being able to quickly and easily tick off these boxes speeds up development and deployment—while also producing stronger, more resilient product offerings.
To learn more about how cloud computing can help you go to market more quickly, take a look at our hybrid cloud guide or reach out to one of the cloud experts at Canon Business Services ANZ.
