February 12, 2022 | By Greg Dougherty
Businesses deal with IT tasks on a daily basis that can be expensive, time-consuming, and tedious, such as monitoring IT infrastructure and managing sensitive data. While those duties are critical to ensuring the success of a company, they take resources and focus away from strategic growth initiatives.
As more and more businesses transition to cloud-based applications, they face new financial and productivity obstacles, such as securely storing data and applications while complying with strict regulatory requirements. Businesses can outsource cloud infrastructure tasks to free up internal teams and overcome expensive IT challenges including:
- Cloud migration
- Infrastructure downtime
- Protecting data and applications and ensuring compliance
- Assessing which is best-suited to specific workloads: Hosted Private Cloud, Virtual Private Cloud, or Hybrid Cloud
Effectively Migrate to the Cloud
For many businesses, the cloud enables them to easily scale to meet growth needs. The process is expensive, however, and it can be difficult to allocate IT resources effectively in a way that doesn’t interrupt employee productivity caused by the transition. Major costs associated with cloud migration include:
- Hiring tech talent with the expertise and skillsets needed to develop and carry out a migration plan
- Resources spent on building cloud architecture
- Time and money spent training employees on new platforms
Prevent Downtime
Downtime is one of the most expensive IT challenges for business, costing $5,600 per minute according to Gartner. Losing access to mission-critical data and applications causes reduced employee productivity, which stalls tasks as team members wait for servers to come back online. When dealing with downtime, businesses are still paying their workers their normal rates despite having slower or delayed projects. One effective way to promote uptime is to leverage Disaster Recovery solutions from a provider.
Secure Data and Applications
While the cloud offers several advantages compared to on-premises data hosting, it requires different strategies for securing data and applications. The risks are huge— the average total cost of a data breach is nearly $4 million, and the cost of a breach is even more expensive for organizations handling sensitive data, such as those within the healthcare and financial sectors. In addition to the financial expenses associated with breaches, organizations also risk losing brand integrity and customer trust if their personal data becomes compromised.
When hosting data and applications in the cloud, businesses also must determine how to best store them where they are most protected from malicious attackers, and where their access is limited to authorized users only. Even with the proper security measures, there is always the risk of human error causing data loss, however, that can be mitigated with the right cloud backup and disaster recovery technology.
Ensure Compliance
Organizations handling sensitive employee and user information, especially in industries including healthcare and government, must follow strict compliance regulations to avoid paying costly fines, which can reach up to $1.5 million in annual fees for HIPAA violations, for example. In order to avoid those fines, some businesses hire compliance staff to ensure regulations are being followed while other companies add cloud-based services to address this challenge. However, not every cloud platform will comply with each industry’s unique regulations and should be verified prior to implementation.
Outsource Cloud Management To Overcome IT Challenges
Businesses that outsource cloud tasks through a managed cloud provider can:
- Enhance productivity with greater uptime
- Promote scalable infrastructure that can easily implement emerging technologies
- Ensure strict compliance requirements are met including HIPAA-HITECH, PCI-DSS, FISMA, CJIS, and others
- Provide expert guidance on how to best allocate IT resources to drive business value and profitability
Want to learn more about the advantages managed cloud services provide business leaders? Find out how to turn IT into a profit center by downloading the guide.