With the cloud growing in popularity and capabilities, many organizations have made the decision to transition to this technology and begin their own cloud journey. Companies like The Hartford, Delhaize America, and Pearson, for example, have all successfully made the move to the cloud for various reasons.

The Hartford uses a hybrid cloud model that enables them to anticipate and meet the needs of customers and agents for their group benefits, mutual funds, and property and casualty businesses. The company expects to reduce costs, improve system availability and business continuity, and bring products and services to market faster thanks to the inherent benefits that cloud computing offers. Delhaize America is utilizing the cloud to run big data and analytics to study the impact of local weather on store and category sales. By mixing cloud infrastructure with their current IT environment, Delhaize expects that the cloud will assist them in making smarter decisions about inventory, promotions, pricing, and staffing. Pearson went to the cloud in order to transform the way they deliver education globally. They are using the cloud’s efficiency as part of a strategic enterprise-wide business transformation that will allow them to free up resources to invest in new educational products for their customers.

That’s great news for companies like the ones mentioned above, and now you can see why they, and other large enterprises, are going to the cloud. However, what does this mean for enterprises that haven’t quite made the move yet? Should your enterprise make the move to the cloud, and more importantly, what can the cloud do for you? It’s no secret that the cloud’s praises have been sung by many IT professionals over the years, but it can still be difficult to determine what it can mean for your particular enterprise.

Why Should an Enterprise Make the Move?

Among many reasons, the most persuasive is the fact that the cloud has the ability to free up an IT executive’s time so they can focus on more important business issues. A CIO’s day should consist of focusing on items such as mobility, big data, security, and increasing revenue. This hardly leaves time for worrying about servers, data centers, and software releases, which unfortunately can tend to take up a large chunk of a CIO’s time instead of more strategic business endeavors without the help of cloud computing.

Additionally, the adaptability of cloud computing, even for operations of a significant size, coupled with greater assurances, economies of scale, and increased productivity and agility all add up toward a strong argument for enterprises to make the move.

What Can the Cloud do for you?

Cloud computing allows you to scale vastly and immediately, and adapt to support standardization, automation, user self-service, process integration, and greater collaboration. Not to mention, you can reduce costs and offload commodity activities, as mentioned previously. To put it simply, the cloud allows you to fashion an entirely new business model that links both internal people and processes to customers, working partners, and vendors, furthering your ability to strategically align your IT with business initiatives.

So our question for you is; why haven’t you made the move to the cloud yet?