Determining And Achieving Business Advantage

Moving to the cloud is also about gaining new capabilities from the rapid-scale, elastic workload and geolocation benefits of public cloud infrastructure. A company that needs to support a business unit in London doesn't need to contract with a separate data center provider to make it happen. The major cloud providers have data centers all around the world, offering the best reliability and fail-over capabilities for 24-hour businesses. Rapid scale can provide a competitive advantage, yet outside experts with plenty of experience migrating companies to the cloud can help a business understand exactly what’s needed to get there.

How the channel helps: Partners that have experience modernizing and refactoring applications within specific verticals can be the most help here, especially in such industries as government, retail, healthcare and financial services, where data and application requirements are complex and regulated. Developing expertise in DevOps and TechOps tools is critical to enable continuous integration and continuous delivery, and to build automation capabilities for rapid development.

Managing The Cloud

Once a company has successfully moved workloads or deployed new services in the cloud, it needs a partner to monitor and manage the cloud environment. Even though cloud providers manage the infrastructure, a company must still manage its own workloads. Cloud infrastructure services generate lots of data, events and alerts that need to be analyzed. Also, the company is constantly incurring costs that can be reduced by optimizing its resources.

How the channel helps: Cloud service providers should be able to manage and monitor cloud environments, ensuring that services are running efficiently. Cloud optimization requires deep expertise with tools and techniques, something a good partner can bring. Partners that want to succeed in this space should work with providers that have a managed services DNA and deep experience in hybrid cloud management. Optimizing cloud environments requires the ability to forecast compute and storage needs. In doing so, partners can make use of services that can provide discounted cloud computing capacity, significantly reducing a customer's cloud spend.

MAKING IT SIMPLE FOR CUSTOMERS

When it comes to making transformational changes in how IT resources are developed, managed, provisioned and delivered, most companies will need outside help. This offers a prime opportunity for partners skilled in infrastructure management and cloud migration. Customers need help at all points along the way – from assessment and evaluation, to selecting a cloud provider, migrating assets, maintaining and managing those assets, and then optimizing for continued success. Partners that want to compete in this market need to either develop these skills or find other organizations to fill the gaps. The end goal is to make all of this simple and relatively pain-free for customers.

Cloud computing has evolved as a much more complex and risky endeavor than most of us had been led to believe several years ago. Now, it’s time to make this a mature, professional offering for customers, with a focus on business results and ROI.