If you're a cloud advocate, trying to sell your company's leadership on the idea of making costly changes to its infrastructure, it can feel like an uphill battle. Techies intuitively understand how the cloud can improve agility, efficiency and security but you'll need to convince decision makers that it will be worth the money and time spent migrating to the cloud. And so this post is all about how to make the transition from an on-premise solution to one in the cloud as painless and stress-free as possible with executive buy-in.
This includes lowering the risk to the company, showing that the move will be cost effective and gaining corporate buy-in.
The best way to make this argument is by quoting the numbers. If you can get executives to see just how much money they can save and how a cloud migration will improve their use of resources, they are much more likely to make the change. The following four sections belong in any pitch to C-suite executives that will ultimately have to sign off on the transition:
Case study:
Here's an easy one that gets a lot of traction with execs: The Budget spreadsheet below shows a BeCloud real-world example of monthly costs for right-sized cloud servers compared to an on-premise solution. The cloud solution is based on Amazon Web Services (AWS) reserve instances. BeCloud monitored the legacy on-premise solution for a week and recommended the EC2 instances types that would satisfy performance requirements. The competing on-premise solution consisted of new server hardware running VMware and a backup system to locally store snapshots and move them to the cloud. We utilized our audit results to advocate for the replacement of three servers running on outdated physical hardware with cloud resources that would clearly result in a significant cost savings.
Estimated Solution Cost
Currency is in USD, annually on premise cost include 1.5TB of storage, power and OS licenses. The EC2 cost are based on right sizing physical hardware running on EC2 instances with included OS licenses with Reserve Instance pricing.
From a business perspective, the numbers speak for themselves. There is a cost savings over purchasing updated physical equipment outright. Sometimes we have been able to shave costs further by utilizing other AWS services such as AWS Directory Service, ECS, FSX, S3 and Lambda in our solution proposals.
The next step is to show how this shift to the cloud could actually lead to a few other key benefits.
2. Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Analysis:
One benefit is the TCO possible savings with a cloud solution. The cost of supporting the IT infrastructure is spread out utilizing AWS cost at scale. In the example above, the three servers utilize Amazons Global Network, specially designed hardware, security and maintenance schedules to squeeze out a lower Total Cost of Ownership while at the same time improving agility, security and availability.
With the cloud, the IT Department is no longer responsible for maintaining hardware updates into existing infrastructure. From an operational perspective, Amazon maintains the entire network stack.
As a result, the company can take back some of its investment in IT support by shifting to allocating a smaller portion of its total budget to technology expenses. This would typically be dedicated toward infrastructure (hardware and software). The other part of the budget can be used for other needs.
3. The Agility argument:
One additional benefit that decision makers often appreciate is how cloud technology can change — even evolve — much more quickly than traditional IT infrastructure. This is because cost and difficulty are not factors in maintaining this virtual infrastructure. The software team should not have to take into account how much it will cost or how many resources it will take to upgrade the code on this infrastructure. The cost of change is virtually non-existent.
If there's a new technology that cutting-edge companies are using, your team could potentially support it. This could also include niche industries that don't have much market share, but are growing quickly and have their needs for specific technology needs addressed by cloud solutions. Alternatively, we have proposed for example - That our customers specifically "Engineering firms" should consider hosting engineering desktops with niche software in the cloud. Those niche applications could be rotated and utilized on a per project/engineer basis. Those costs can then be tracked and directly billed to the customer.
4. Future-proof and Modernization Benefits:
As a final note, Our proposals show how the cloud provides a great way to prepare for what's coming next. This means embracing new technologies — such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and IoT — that are quickly emerging but haven't been widely adopted yet.
Artificial intelligence, one of the newest technologies to emerge in recent years, is helping organizations better understand and process data. IoT offers a way to monitor and manage objects from within a secure environment. This means all of the risks associated with connecting, managing and maintaining any type of physical devices will be greatly reduced.
Because the cloud has also been designed to scale up quickly, it would be able to support these emerging technologies while also keeping them secure and reliable. Companies that are agile gain certain competitive advantages over laggards.
However, there are some basic issues that most organizations will need help with when considering a move from on-premise to the cloud.
Choose BeCloud Cloud Migration Services, because we will easily address the following top ten cloud migration concerns:
- Lowering the risk of cloud migrations through the entire life cycle.
If you need to convince others in your company that it's time for a shift to a cloud solution, then it's important to show that it's not as risky as they may think. BeCloud's engineers and technicians have the experience and capabilities to help you move to the cloud without worrying about risk. We identify risk and design solutions around it. - Decrease cloud cost by right-sizing your infrastructure.
As discussed earlier, if the transition from an on-premise solution to one in the cloud doesn't prove to be cost-effective, then your argument is over before it even starts. BeCloud can audit your current environment and give you a detailed cost analysis to show exactly how much money you could be saving by migrating to the cloud. Or in rare cases expose why a workload might not be ready for migration. - Get executive buy-in for cloud migration.
If a CIO or CTO is on board and supports the move to the cloud, it's more likely that other departments will follow suit. But if they don't support it because of manpower concerns, then there are ways to overcome this issue. Utilize BeCloud's managed IT services, which ensures that at least one engineer always has time for any migration issues during your transition period. That should give executives extra piece of mind. - Utilize the cloud in as many ways as possible.
As you know the cloud is much more than just storage space and a way to send emails or documents, to take advantage of all the services offered by hosting your IT infrastructure in the cloud. You need a partner that understands and has experience with the many tools and services available. BeCloud has expertise that will add more value to your transition and improve overall effectiveness. So instead of spending time installing, monitoring and maintaining servers, you can use that time to grow your business! - Implement robust cloud security and protect assets during cloud migration.
Just because it's in the cloud doesn't mean you no longer have to worry about security. BeCloud brings you comprehensive up-to-date expertise in services such as: Amazon GuardDuty, AWS IAM Identity Center, Amazon Detective, Amazon Macie, AWS WAF and AWS Network Firewall to ensure that your data remains safe by protecting it from external attacks, user errors and even natural disasters. During the migration we take extra precautions to protect data. - Manage data backups and data sync before and after cloud migration.
Another time-consuming and labor-intensive task that can now be outsourced to a cloud migration service provider is the backing up and syncing of your data. Sure, you can back it up yourself and do it regularly, but it's better to let the experts do it for you so you can focus on more important tasks.
BeCloud offers a backup/sync solution that will allow you to migrate data on-demand as well as schedule regular automatic backups and data syncs. - Reduce technical debt with cloud migration.
In the past, whenever new technology was released, companies would have to wait for their providers to implement it in their infrastructure before they could take advantage of it. The cloud is constantly evolving and updating its services, so you no longer have to wait for the next release. You can take advantage of new features as soon as they're available. In addition, many times we identify zombie servers and projects that are discontinued and as a result not migrated to cloud. - BeCloud's cloud migration services offers company's peace of mind.
When you outsource your infrastructure migration jobs to BeCloud, you'll no longer have to worry about data migration security or typical cloud migration risk. BeCloud utilizes Amazon Web Services as our go to service provider because they continually add new features and functionality to cloud migration services. BeCloud is an AWS Certified Partner that takes pride in keeping up with the latest updates so that they we can implement effective technology through all our migration engagements. - We enable long term agility.
Hosting your IT infrastructure in the cloud means that it's easier to scale with your business without worrying about whether the current infrastructure can handle more users or increasing traffic. With the cloud, you can access your data from anywhere and with any device. We utilize AWS App streaming, and Workspaces to offer cutting edge, secure remote access for many of our customers during COVID-19 and today! - Don't be put off by the learning curve.
It may seem as though there's a steep learning curve when it comes to switching over to the cloud, but that doesn't have to be the case. BeCloud's certified engineers are always available to help you make the transition as smooth as possible. We can build the solution, maintain it or hand off support to your Internal IT department once they are trained. Enabling a shorter learning curve is one of our value adds.
Get more control of your IT infrastructure with BeCloud's cloud management solutions.
It's never too late to move your business technology to the cloud! With BeCloud you can obtain cutting edge cloud technology solutions while getting rid of costly hardware and technical debt. A correctly configured cloud environment will providing greater security and compliance at a lower cost than most on-premise solutions. Use cloud migration services to migrate faster with less risk.
About BeCloud:
BeCloud started as a cloud services company in 2011. We provide comprehensive solution management that spans infrastructure and applications hosted in the cloud. BeCloud works with companies of all sizes, from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies, to provide businesses with reliable cloud environments. We support you every step of the way no matter where you are in your cloud journey.