Though more and more companies have adopted cloud computing, there are those that are still hesitant. If you need to sell Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to your management, don’t pitch it as a technology initiative; pitch it on its business benefits. Sure, mention the lower cost and improved IT responsiveness and support, but you may get more traction by pointing out how IaaS will be good for your business’s business.
The Business Benefits of Infrastructure as a Service
There are lots of ways using IaaS lets your business do business better, including:
- Scalability. Using IaaS lets you scale your IT infrastructure up to meet spikes in demand, like holiday shopping or the unexpected popularity of a product after a celebrity wears it. Equally important, IaaS lets you scale your IT infrastructure back down after the peak demand subsides, meaning you aren’t left with a lot of expensive, unused capacity in your data center.
- Flexibility. Another benefit of that scalability is that it gives your business a lot of flexibility. You can easily spin up a small environment to support a trial of a new offering. If it turns out to be popular, upsize your environment to support the demand. If the product is a flop, just shut down. There’s no hard cost to experimenting. This also means that it takes next to no time to get a new offering out to the public, which can be a strong competitive advantage.
- New market opportunities. Using cloud service providers gives you the opportunity to have a physical presence in different geographic locations. This can allow you to offer services to customers who you might have had to avoid before due to performance problems or concerns about complying with local data privacy regulations.
- Avoid business downtime. If your business is highly dependent on your IT (and what business today isn’t?), anytime your IT goes down, your entire business goes down. IaaS offers high levels of reliability, with service level agreements that can offer nearly 100% uptime. The cloud also can enable disaster recovery (DR) solutions that allow you to support tighter recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives than an on-premises data center and homegrown DR strategy can.
- Protect your business reputation. The high reliability mentioned above doesn’t just keep your business running; it also protects your business from the reputational damage of outages. Security breaches can also severely damage your business reputation. With the cloud provider’s support, it’s easier to keep your environment secure and compliant with all your industry’s regulations.
How can your business benefit from IaaS? Contact dcVAST to learn more about our IaaS services and why choosing IaaS is the right choice for your business team, not just your technology team.
