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Businesses can and do gain significant benefits from tranforming with cloud business applications. Business benefit with cloud services through:

• Gaining advantage over the competition,
• Introducing capabilities that only large enterprises could previously afford,
• Make people and business more productive,
• Gaining improved TCO over traditional in-house comparatives,
• Improvements in time to market.

However there are pitfalls that can delay and minimise your success with a cloud service strategy. The earliest adopters identified and lived the issues, allowing you to learn from them and maximise your success from the cloud.

To be successful in transforming your business to leverage cloud services, you need to embrace a change plan that covers the three winning elements.

1. Vendor Selection
2. Planned Deployments
3. Integration

Vendor Selection

Vendor selection is the first, and arguably, the most important element. There are many vendors (with new entrants appearing daily) all with varied levels of functionality and capabilities. Many businesses have a hard time selecting who to work with and face challenges managing multiple cloud providers. Key challenges include: different service level agreements, different deployment needs/complexities, having to explain your needs and objectives to each vendor and time consumption/costs of managing of multiple providers.

You have to coordinate multiple vendors for data integration, response and resolution times will vary, you will have to manage multiple billing and payments, there may be no centralised administration control capability for employee and applications may not be well connected or integrated

Planned Deployments

Turnkey deployment service and support is of significant value. It is imperative to assess your specific needs and develop clear plans for implementation.

Your implementation plan must consider People, Process and Technology. A critical element often neglected is people. Your people need buy-in to the change management process and they can make it or break it.

Common deployment issues include: Longer than expected deployment cycles, limited integration with other applications, lack of training and lack of customisation.

To ensure smooth deployments you must consider recruiting vendors and partners that offer implementation packages over lengthy/pricey custom engagements. You may also consider test driving the application to explore the functionality prior to signing a contract, ensuring you have a trial period or money back period and indentify applications with intuitive interfaces to improve user adoption and reduce training needs.

Integration

As cloud adoption increases, so does the need for data integration. Integration plans are a critical component of an application implementation and cloud adopters who integrate experience real benefits: measurable increases in operational efficiency, improvements in staff productivity, easier connection with customers and suppliers, improved cash flow cycles, improvements in visibility into day-to-day business operations and increased accuracy of orders, billing and payments.

When evaluating integration, ensure you consider the following factors: ease of use without customised software development, centralised management and reporting capabilities, features that speed up deployment and adoption.

If you are considering transforming you business with Cloud Services and Applications, talk to us at Aryon. We reduce our customers risk up front with value added cloud transformation consulting, and help you to extract maximum value from your investment through our cloud service and integration capabilities.