Updated on August 6, 2019 by Rick Emlet
According to one recent study, 83% of ALL enterprise workloads are expected to be in the cloud as soon as 2020. The same source revealed that about half of all IT professionals say that current advancements in both artificial intelligence and machine learning are playing a key role in this adoption, as both are predicted to grow by a rate of about 67% by roughly the same period of time.
Indeed, the list of Fortune 100 companies alone that have already placed substantial workloads in the cloud at this point is staggering. Clearly, they’ve been among the first to identify the major advantages that such an infrastructure brings with it – but the important thing to understand is that they won’t be the last. Thanks to the rate at which technology continues to advance, these exact same cost effective resources that are being leveraged by industry giants are ALSO available to small and mid-sized companies. This is true in a wide array of different ways, all of which are certainly worth exploring.
The Power of Cloud Computing: Breaking Things Down
According to Amazon’s own internal figures, the total number of active AWS users currently exceeds 1,000,000. Keep in mind that AWS is just one of the many, many cloud computing providers currently available.
- One of the most notable of those enterprise-scale users is Netflix, which was an early adopter of AWS and has been using those resources since 2009.
- Social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook are also among that total.
- Major media organizations like the BBC and ESPN are accounted for, too.
However, keep in mind that despite all of these major names, one recent poll suggests that enterprise-scale users only make up about 10% of all AWS customers.
Many of these large, multinational organizations have already made the jump to the cloud because they recognize the value that it brings in a plethora of different ways. The cloud is far more flexible than a traditional computing environment, for example, as businesses can scale their services to fit the precise needs of their users. Even custom applications can be deployed instantly and access to all cloud services is available from any device, from any location, with an active Internet connection.
There’s an enormous strategic value to be examined, too. Cloud services give enterprises of all types a major competitive advantage by providing access to the most innovative technology available in the moment. You don’t have to make an enormous up-front capital investment today for resources that are woefully out of date a year from now. You always have access to the “latest and greatest” that technology has to offer because that is a large part of what you’re paying for in the first place.
That of course bleeds directly into the significant cost savings that the cloud has become synonymous with. Because cloud computing relies so heavily on remote resources, organizations aren’t buying servers, real estate and other equipment at all, nor are they required to have a large IT staff – instead, they’re buying ACCESS to those resources. Cloud service providers like Outer Edge Technology, that have multi-discipline IT subject matter expert teams that are cost prohibitive for most companies, are often engaged to design, configure and manage these IT resources over the long-term freeing up internal IT resources to focus on assisting the company make a better widget.
Even something as important as business continuity becomes exponentially easier in the cloud. In the unfortunate event that you DO suffer from some type of catastrophe like hardware failure, you’re not also dealing with data loss on top of it because of things like networked backups. If you have an important file on a local hard drive and that drive fails, you’re probably not getting that data back. If that same file exists in the cloud, however, the same hard drive failure becomes meaningless because the data was never really “there” in the first place. It’s still accessible via the cloud, the same as it ever was.
The Future of Your Business Rests in the Technology of Today
In the end, maybe the most critical thing to understand is that from an IT perspective, there really isn’t as much separating Fortune 100 companies from small and mid-sized enterprises as you may have expected. The cloud is the cloud – it’s not like a larger organization has access to some special, “fancy” version that is unavailable to their smaller competitors.
Because of scalability and the lower costs enjoyed in the cloud, EVERYONE, regardless of size, can take full advantage of this type of IT environment and many types of businesses already are. This is ultimately why your own organization is potentially at risk if you DON’T adopt a cloud-first strategy.
The accessibility of the technology itself has essentially leveled the playing field, making it possible for any company to compete on the same scale regardless of their budget. Therefore, the competitive advantage of the future is born not through access to this technology, but in how it is eventually utilized. If you don’t capitalize on this, your competitors will – and at that point, you’ll have conceded your competitive advantage in a way that you may not be able to recover from.
The Outer Edge Technology Approach
At Outer Edge Technology, we’ve been helping companies – Fortune 100 or otherwise – take full advantage of cutting edge, cost effective technology solutions for over a decade. Not only do we design, build and manage technology solutions in our data centers and public cloud platforms like AWS and Azure for businesses, we specialize in bringing innovative IT approaches to ALL organizations, regardless of their size.
Whether you’re looking to move workloads to the cloud, need assistance on a project-by-project basis, need a long-term engagement or even just want to augment your existing staff, Outer Edge does IT right – no exceptions.
If you’d like to find out more information about why so many Fortune 100 companies are making the jump into the cloud, or if you have any additional questions you’d like to discuss with someone in a bit more detail, please don’t delay – contact Outer Edge Technology today by calling 1-844-OET-EDGE or emailing info@OuterEdge.biz.
