Assessing the Cloud to Find its Silver Lining

Featured article by Russ Loignon, Vice President of Cloud Consulting, Tangoe

Business moves at the speed of light, and the ability to stay competitive in today’s global workplace dictates that enterprises rely on the technology available today, yet be prepared to adapt quickly for future technologies.

Arguably the hottest technology today is cloud computing. Cloud services have emerged as scalable enterprise solutions that offer significant advantages to organizations such as:

– Cost efficiencies: Traditional software can become expensive to implement and maintain between licensing fees for multiple users and the cost of the IT personnel to maintain it. The cloud, however, requires no software to implement or maintain – even updates are done remotely – which can not only lower IT expenses significantly, but also provide “pay as you grow” opportunities allowing companies to budget for cloud services as a utility.

– Unlimited Storage: because the cloud resides on the Web, it offers companies unlimited storage…but companies only have to use as much as they need and can increase their capacity as their business grows.

– Disaster recovery: All cloud computing initiatives have one thing in common – data is centralized, while users are distributed. By definition, cloud services are a sensible solution for disaster recovery because they are separated from the catastrophe and therefore out of harm’s way.

– Anytime-Anywhere access: Because data is available online via the cloud, it can be accessed by any authorized personnel from any device or location.

All of these benefits allow enterprises to become more productive, collaborative, and ultimately more competitive in their industries, while also helping them connect more effectively with customers, users, other devices and the world in general.

Unfortunately, developing and maintaining a successful cloud solution for an enterprise is an overwhelming task. Vendors, employees, processes and technologies are all involved and many organizations lack the necessary expertise and industry knowledge needed to run a cloud program. Furthermore, managing elements such as infrastructure costs, technical capabilities and government regulations are simply too much for internal resources.

Between these complexities of cloud services, and with new cloud products being rolled out every day, organizations may find it very difficult to decide not only which cloud solution is right for them, but also how much of their operations they should commit to the cloud.

Like any business decision, the cloud choice needs to be broken down and assessed on a case-by-case basis. Each enterprise needs to take five steps to look at its needs and determine where a cloud solution would fit and its level of commitment. These steps are:

1. Define Organizational Objectives: organizations must evaluate their specific goals and parameters, to uncover their needs in terms of cost/budget, flexibility, security and necessary level of industry compliance.

2. Calculate the Decision: organizations should assign a numeric weight or value to each element they assess in order to make a comparison between them. This in-depth scoring system will help companies understand the current state of services and determine which assets are most suited for cloud migration.

3. Eliminate Vendor Confusion: There’s much hype among cloud vendors, which can make it difficult for organizations to identify the best solutions. Often, it helps to employ a third-party organization that has the requisite industry experience to separate the hype from the reality and create a clear transformational plan for the people, processes and technology involved.

4. Investigate Costs: the cornerstone of cloud is cost efficiency, as the cloud does not require a capital investment to set up the infrastructure or an in-house team of IT experts. That notwithstanding, an organization needs to investigate potential vendors to ensure costs are in line with their budgets

5. Confirm Security and Scalability: vendors’ solutions must provide the security needed for business continuity and the scalability to allow the organization either to augment existing systems or to replace on-premises solutions.

By implementing these assessment tools, enterprises are able to develop a business case, define and outline the architecture, and create a plan to achieve operational success in their cloud environments.

Russ Loignon, VP of Cloud Consulting, Tangoe

With 20+ years in the telecommunications industry, I have held a variety of roles including technical, sales, leadership and business development. Early in my career, I was able to learn the industry as a technician and was certified on nearly every PBX in the marketplace including Mitel, Toshiba, NEC, Nortel and many others.  This was coupled with a fiber optic splice certification and cabling experience.

Later, in my career, I was able to form Systems Management Group.  As President of this consulting and technical resource company, we proudly provided telecommunication services to nearly 300 clients across New England.

Following this experience, I spent the next 16 years at AT&T.  I began my tenure as a data sales representative and successfully supported leading technical, financial and retail firms.  This success led to a promotion to Hosting and Managed Applications Director of Sales supporting the New England region.

As Cloud technology began to emerge, AT&T created the Advance Solutions Organization focused on creating business related cloud offers aimed at Mobility, Healthcare, Sourcing and “as a service” solutions.  I joined this group as Lead Market Development Manager and held that role for 3 years before joining Tangoe.  In this role, I was responsible for Social Media, Big Data and mobile security offers but with a primary focus on the AT&T/IBM joint cloud offer that was launched in the market 2012.  Responsibilities here also included analyst engagements, critical thinking and customer engagements.

As VP of Cloud Consulting, we aim to assist our clients through the Cloud transformation by providing all the necessary consulting services they will need in order to fully reap the benefits that this transformational technology can deliver.