Benefits of Cloud

Reduced time to delivery

Challenge

Delivering new services to your customers takes time. You must establish delivery teams, set out project governance and gather requirements. This is before your teams can design and begin prototyping potential solutions, and procure hardware, software and services. Each stage of the project contributes significantly to the overall time to delivery.

While it is possible to adopt an agile methodology to minimise the 'soft' overheads of a project, the planning and procurement of technology components remain a constant and significant time burden – often, taking four to six weeks.

Benefits

Cloud services help to reduce your time to initial delivery (Alpha) from weeks or months, to hours or days – fostering an action mindset that makes it easier to get started. Cloud services support this approach because they allow:

• self-service and on-demand access: adopting cloud services can mean procurement timescales are a thing of the past. A well-defined and approved cloud procurement path, supported by effective financial controls, can allow internal delivery teams to self-provision required resources on-demand, rather than waiting weeks for your supply chain to fulfil orders, or for IT to provision infrastructure
• proactive prototyping: your delivery teams can begin prototyping as soon as your initial requirements have been gathered. This enables them to discover technical challenges and test solutions earlier in the design process, without needing to work through the usual procurement process for hardware, software and services
• less capacity planning: building new services using cloud technologies reduces the burden of upfront capacity planning and hardware procurement. The existing model of over-provisioning capacity to ensure service performance is retired and replaced with an approach to build lean and scale based on demand
• no capital expenditure upfront: the requirement to buy hardware, software and services upfront is removed in most cases. By removing the need to commit to large CapEx purchases upfront, you also simplify your business case and procurement effort, and allow delivery teams to more flexibly try multiple solutions before choosing the best fit
• low-risk proof-of-concepts: cloud services reduce risk by enabling your delivery teams to build Proof-of-Concepts (PoC) for new services quickly and with a much smaller budgetary commitment. Once completed, concepts can be torn down immediately to eliminate financial waste