Building a Case for Cloud Part 1: The Executive's Guide to Justifying Migration

With the benefits of cloud communications, it's no wonder more and more companies are migrating from their legacy phone systems. Besides cost savings and flexibility, the opportunity for resource pooling, collaboration, mobility, and increased productivity are enticing. But as an executive leader, how do you justify the move for your organization?  

Rationalizing the integration of cloud services into your infrastructures successfully means it's crucial to understand—and demonstrate—the impact it will have on your business and financial management processes. This involves assessing how cloud services can support your organization's goals and identifying the potential benefits and challenges of cloud adoption.  

Furthermore, no cloud migration is one size fits all. What makes sense for one business may not make any sense for another.  

Before you leap, here’s part one of our two-part series for making your move to the cloud value-based, including what you need to know to evaluate and justify migration: 

Crafting a Value-Driven Cloud Migration  

Setting the right tone from the beginning is vital when planning a cloud migration. It's important to align your business goals with the priorities of other leaders. There are several common business objectives to consider, such as: 

• Flexibility: Cloud-native applications and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) can scale with demand, eliminating the headache of outgrowing on-premises servers or repeated equipment upgrades. 

• Reliability: Cloud providers offer backup architecture with redundancy failover for optimum availability, keeping organizations from experiencing outages. 

• Cost-Efficiency: Cost-optimization is also possible with the cloud, allowing organizations to fine-tune usage to match demand and stay on budget. 

• Originality: Cloud allows development teams to innovate efficiently, allowing them to quickly create and tear down environments for prototyping or testing.  

• Business Insights: Data analytics allow organizations to analyze customer purchasing patterns and internal operations, leading to more effective business decisions. 

Evaluate the Cost of a Lost Opportunity 

While agility, innovation, and speed are some of the challenging-to-measure benefits of cloud computing, not considering them is a lost opportunity. Maintaining the status quo won't do in today's intensely competitive markets. Staying ahead of the competition and the need to adapt proactively to technological advancements keeps you in the leader segment.  

How do you quantify their relevance? Ask yourself these questions:  

• Can your organization scale as quickly as those that operate in the cloud? 

• Are your on-premises data centers siloed, making it difficult for different regions or business units to collaborate effectively?  

• Do you leverage business intelligence and data analytics in a dynamic, innovative way to drive company growth?  

• Can you adapt quickly to new business models to stay competitive? 

•  What opportunities might you miss out on by failing to migrate specific workloads or applications to the cloud? 

Failing to consider the potential cost of lost opportunities can lead to missed chances to innovate, adapt, and thrive in today's fast-paced business landscape. 

Remember to factor in tangible and non-tangible benefits when planning your move. By doing so, executive leaders can effectively prepare for a successful cloud migration that maximizes the advantages while minimizing the risks. 

Are you ready to learn more about your options when moving to the cloud? Contact a migration specialist here. We'd love to help.