Cloud Enablement: What Is It And How To Get Started

In the era of diverse, on-demand services technology, cloud applications have been a growing focus for business owners as they have underpinned the global economy, supply chains, and remote workforces by fostering enterprises’ agility and ultimately sustained digital growth. Cloud Enablement, one of the most popular cloud solutions, has contributed to transforming business performance remarkably. Unlocking the full potential of your business, associated with the emergence of cloud enablement will surely drive you to resounding success.

What is Cloud Enablement?

To put simply, Cloud enablement is to strategically relocate an organization’s on-premises IT infrastructure, software applications, and other resources onto the public, private or hybrid cloud environment. In other words, cloud enablement refers to how business operations can be deployed to the cloud. 

In a broader scope, cloud enablement is much more than moving IT systems to the cloud. Many businesses are under a great deal of external pressure to be more agile, associated with exacting requirements on IT development and operations teams to accelerate the delivery of digital solutions. If you are a developing business, you may be contemplating whether cloud computing is right for you. This digital transformation allows organizations to utilize either a private cloud, public cloud, community cloud, or hybrid cloud environment, depending on which best suits their business requirements, highlighting a critical step closer to faster development, speedier implementations, and more secure operations. 

Suggested read: Why digital transformation is important

How Cloud Enablement Accelerates Business?

The primary benefit that cloud enablement brings back is to ensure businesses successfully migrate and operate on cloud systems. Particularly, cloud enablement is fully optimized as it offers possibilities for businesses to enhance their working performance, including:

• Cost optimizations
• Consistent accessibility and availability
• Scalability
• Increased data safety and availability. Check out Data security in cloud for further information
• Improved allocation and utilization of business resources
• Risk minimization
• Enhanced employee and customer experiences
• Revenue growth

For the past five years, Organizations have been altering their approach to embracing and integrating cloud technology, shifting the focus from tactics to a much more strategic process that seeks to achieve maximum benefit for the entire organization.

For instance, instead of solely relying on the cloud for disaster recovery, organizations are now utilizing cloud enablement to enhance employee and customer experiences, boost retention rates, and drive revenue growth, among other impactful business outcomes.

What are Cloud Enablement challenges?

It is undeniable that there are some certain challenges for cloud enablement that may arise during execution. These possibly include: legacy system compatibility, vendor lock-in, data security and privacy concerns, and skill gap. Approximately 83% of organizations consider security to be a top challenge to enabling cloud. Other challenges to be recorded include managing cloud spend, governance, lack of resources and a lack of expertise, according to Statista.com. 

You can also find more about top cloud vulnerabilities to look out for 2024, where 10 prevailing limitations of cloud are indicated, provoking a necessity for practices of Cloud Susceptibility Management. 

The most popular cloud enablement solutions are the several "as-a-service" options that address these issues. According to Statista, "these services give businesses access to software, processing power, and other cloud-related functions without requiring internal hardware."

Cloud enablement strategy

To embark on your cloud enablement strategy, these following steps can be performed: 

1. Set clear goals: Identify your organization’s goals and expectations from cloud enablement initiatives, such as reducing IT overhead, improving agility and enabling remote work opportunities, then align them with your entire business strategy.
2. Opt for a cloud deployment model: Determine which cloud model is best-suited for your organization, ranging from public cloud where all infrastructure is owned and managed by the cloud provider, private cloud with cloud computing resources used exclusively by one organization, to hybrid cloud where a combination of on-premises infrastructure with cloud services is present.
3. Select the right cloud service partner: Take into account the provider’s comprehensive facets, including certifications and standards, data and governance practices, the platform’s reliability and performance, their contract and service-level agreement choices, migration support, whether their platform aligns with the technologies used in the organization's current setup, and other relevant factors. You can see which provider is ideal for your business operation by taking the first step of requesting a demo to the cloud vendor partners, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Axalize. 

Frequently asked questions about cloud enablement resources

Q: What does cloud computing enable?

A: Cloud computing allows organizations to access and store information without managing their own physical devices or IT infrastructure. For that, cloud computing has its applications spanning over a spectrum of mainstream sectors, such as healthcare, education, and banking.  

Q: What are some examples of cloud enablement in organizations?

A: An illustration of a cloud-enabled application is an HR management system.

For a cloud-based email service, migrating email services from on-premises servers to cloud platforms such as Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 is involved. This transition enhances email reliability and diminishes maintenance efforts.

Q: How does cloud enable scalability?

A: With the adoption of cloud services, organizations have the flexibility to adjust their services levels in response to changes in business demands, eliminating the need for investment in additional hardware. 

Conclusion

Cloud computing is a vast and constantly evolving field. A well-planned shift to the cloud, associated with the selection of the appropriate Cloud Service Provider (CSP), is vital to achieving the desired outcomes.

When collaborating with Axalize, there is an extensive availability of a wealth of expertise derived from serving numerous clients across various sectors. We comprehend your content services and business requirements, offering the necessary assistance to secure executive approval. As a cloud services specialist, Axalize can help meet your business needs through our suite of integrated services. 

If you have any further questions or clarifications about the cloud, feel free to Contact Us.