The speed, flexibility, and price benefits of private cloud computing are well known, but companies will not fully realise those benefits if their applications, infrastructure, and platform companies exist in isolation from one another and from their legacy systems.
Integrating a cloud management system into your business is critical as organisations look to maximize the more than $127 billion in annual public cloud investments which the International Data Corporation forecasts they’ll make by 2018.
The advantages of cloud integration boil down to helping businesses accomplish six basic objectives:
Accelerate time to market
Call it whatever you would like, business agility, nimbleness, or just the realisation that customers, suppliers, and partners need access to a company’s latest products and solutions now, not when your IT company gets around to delivering the supporting performance.
Often it is inhibited by the tools unique to a specific platform-as-service (PaaS) or infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) that provide from a multitude of companies. A business CMS that has fully integrated cloud stack consisting of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS (software as a service) are the only businesses fully optimised for this speedy delivery of products and solutions.
Business agility is of utmost importance to companies globally. In a new Oracle poll of 2,263 companies, 81 percent of respondents said the ability to quickly develop, test, and launch new business applications is critically important or significant to the success of the companies. Conversely, when asked to identify the largest threat for their companies, the greatest proportion of respondents (27 percent) cited that it was the ability of opponents to establish innovative customer services more rapidly than their businesses could. Yet the survey results indicate that firms are overestimating their own agility. Significantly, the results show that companies are not minding the agility benefits delivered by PaaS particularly.
Nearly half (49 percent) of the companies surveyed either cannot, or don’t know whether they could, change workloads among public, private, and hybrid cloud management systems, in addition to migrating on-premises software to the cloud. And only half of these say they could develop, test, and deploy new business applications for use on mobile devices over six months; only 30 percent within a month, and shockingly, only 32 percent of respondents even fully comprehend what PaaS is.
Free up IT resources to perform more innovative, customer-focused work
The development of the CIO in the master of speeds, feeds, and system uptime to a more tactical, customer-engaging, revenue-generating function has been continuing for decades. But the Internet of Things, new “collaborative market” business models, and the increase of cloud support, mobile, social, and information analytic technologies will disrupt businesses like never before. So it’s imperative that CIOs and their IT organizations move beyond spending most of their valuable time fussing with middleware and other operational tasks.
IT Leaders need cloud infrastructure and applications which work together seamlessly so that they can concentrate on what matters most: building a competitive advantage for their businesses and increasing worker productivity through seamless cloud systems.
Improve and automate business processes via information sharing Information across applications will help to automate and speed up business processes. Sales reps require a system which ensures the sales management software they use also captures information about prospects calling to the business contact center to help capture sales. Just like procurement systems need to share information with e-commerce systems, and HR recruiting systems with social networks.
In a B2B Circumstance, if you make it hard for clients or partners to get to your order-entry or inventory systems, they will take their business elsewhere. Manufacturing companies need to have cloud-based data integration with the systems of many different suppliers and partners–design, technology, components, logistics, distribution, warehousing, and transportation to minimize inventories while ensuring timely access to goods.
Say a company with a cloud-based sales management (CRM) system decides to begin selling through a network of vendors and partners as opposed to direct to consumers. Instead of having to purchase a new CRM system, the client can construct the incremental partner management performance on its PaaS. But it is going to succeed only if it’s seamless, real time access to data in a number of its other cloud and on-premises applications. Especially when a company builds cloud software on exactly the identical PaaS, it can incorporate and expand them without needing to employ skill sets specific to each different program in the portfolio.
Extend Investments in legacy systems and software
Tight integration between cloud and on-premises software can also be critical, so that businesses can extend the life span of the legacy systems and tap into these rich data stores. Ripping it out and replacing legacy systems is not only costly, but it’s also disruptive, as they are woven into so many unique processes and systems, and the process could hurt worker productivity rather than improve it.
Upscale or downscale easily
One of the biggest advantages of cloud infrastructure and software solutions is that companies can purchase as much or as little as they want at a specific point in time. There is no need to over-purchase for spikes in customer/user demand. The same goes for the integration of these cloud services into the business; clients can quickly increase or decrease connections as business requirements change, so long as those cloud infrastructure and applications are designed to industry standards–with integration in mind in the get-go.
Reduce costs
Most of the expense of enterprise applications lies within the operation of it, the manpower and effort it requires to keep the software running is excessive. The tighter the integration at every layer of the cloud stack, the less demand for specialised middleware and the expensive ability to manage it, hence lowering the entire price of ownership.
