There is no doubt that cloud is the future for most organizations, including resellers. If you take a look at the statistics, cloud adoption has increased 61% from last year, with 73% pursuing a hybrid cloud strategy. On-premises private cloud spending, meanwhile, is projected to increase by 40% over the next two years. Yet, challenges in cloud adoption exist. Recently on EDGE360, Matt Karst, Senior Director of the Cloud Practice at Westcon-Comstor, highlighted the issues with cloud adoption today: Figuring out which vendors to represent, developing cloud expertise, and effectively integrating cloud into existing sales and logistics operations. IDC refers to these challenges as “cloud gaps.” How can value added resellers address these current cloud gaps?
According to a recent IDC study, there are five levels of cloud maturity and only 3% of companies that implement a cloud-optimized strategy excel in business outcomes. In a recent blog, Sergio Licea, Marketing Manager for Cloud Solutions at Cisco Americas, uses Starbucks as an example of a company that has a strategy in place. Starbucks CTO, Gerri Martin-Flickinger, recently reported that the company’s focus is to provide customers with a “consistent global user experience” regardless of what store they visit. Starbucks plans to do this by re-architecting 22 apps into one single app and moving all data through the cloud to connect all locations, whether corporate-owned or licensed. A huge amount of data will need to be stored and analyzed, such as store location, hours of operation, products, price and others. That information will then be merged with the customer’s personal data.
When adopting cloud, organizations often need help to make sure that they have a clear strategy in place to lower gaps that may exist in IT infrastructure, company culture, and existing processes. Here are the four ways Starbucks has done so:
- Application management and performance: Always have a consistent management, compliance, and user experience from one environment to another.
- Security: Ensure you are operating in a secure environment. No company would like to see their name on the news as the latest attacked/hacked company.
- Embrace new network needs. Moving to the cloud will bring some new traffic patterns to their network and no one wants to be disappointed with the network performance.
- DevOps environments. Embracing a DevOps model with continuous development and integration requires profound organizational and cultural change.
How do these gaps translate into how you can help your own customer’s business challenges? First, you must define the business outcome and determine if cloud is an enabler. You can help your customer examine the complexity of their IT infrastructure and locate trustworthy partners to help address their needs. If your customer determines that everything must be migrated to the cloud, they will need some help in management, security, analytics and with the network.
At Westcon-Comstor, we provide the channel expertise and vendor relationships necessary to enable partners to develop private, hybrid and public cloud infrastructures and help providers build, host and sell solutions.
Want to learn more? Contact us today at cloud@westcon.com for more tips on addressing cloud challenges.
