By LindSay Lim, Regional Manager, Zadara
While the pandemic’s impact has been mostly negative when it comes to digitalization and the advancement of business technology it has been a vital accelerator.
As the Regional Manager at Zadara – the recognized leader in edge cloud services, I must say that the pandemic has forced what amounts to a multi-year leap in innovation and utilization. Businesses large and small are now using tech to enhance performance, capabilities, and reach.
Going digital has broken down barriers for business growth, enabling businesses to spread and scale more efficiently and more cost-effectively. Gone are the brick-and-mortar days where a business would require millions to expand globally or significantly scale up operations.
Today cloud technology has taken over and become an indispensable pillar of enterprise-grade companies especially those with presence throughout the globe. The cloud has reduced cost and increased efficiency in general. But when it comes to truly minimizing investments and maximizing returns, it is all about the type of cloud technology that you use.
As the cloud is so all-encompassing, different decision-makers tend to have different concepts and criteria when it comes to the ideal cloud approach for their business.
For instance, Chief Technology Officers are often concerned about the latest technology, reliability, and ease of use. From the perspective of a Chief Information Officer, they are most often focused on platform flexibility, capacity on-demand, and compatibility. Meanwhile, Chief Executive Officers, typically emphasize overall cost, cashflow maximization, time to market, and asset utilization.
Lets take for example a recent case study of a leading regional financial institution. Realising the growing trend of digital banking, the company undertook a major transformation project to further digitalise their processes, systems and services. As a rapidly growing industry player the institution needed a solution that offered the best of both worlds, accessible and highly scalable – to meet their rapid growth needs yet simultaneously cost-efficient and secure – to meet business and regulatory requirements.
Towards that end, the bank opted to proceed with a combined approach of public cloud and private cloud services – obtaining cloud-like, on-demand storage deployed at their premises. From an investment standpoint, this allowed the bank to streamline cost with an OpEx focused pay per use only approach rather than a heavy upfront CapEx investment. This strategic decision also enabled the institution to meet data-intensive customer needs more quickly – cutting down process time from weeks to real time. This increased efficiency has in turn led to increasing customer growth.
Zadara’s enterprise-as-a-service and Edge cloud service offer businesses reliability and flexibility that are key to scaling up efficiently both in terms of performance and investment. Specifically, what makes Zadara’s approach to the cloud so suited to scaling is the ability to support any workload, any data type, any storage at any location all on one platform. The flexibility at the fingertips of businesses allows them to shape and mould their data storage and computing needs as necessary when scaling.
All the while, businesses will be able to exert maximum control over one of the most crucial aspects when it comes to scaling up, operating expenditure. Flexible and highly customized cloud solutions, like that which Zadara employs, enable businesses to only pay for what they use. This helps minimize operating expenditure and avoid major upfront capital expenditure.
Other key factors to consider when scaling include capacity on-demand, a solid uptime guarantee (like Zadara’s 99.999% guarantee), and multi-cloud support as they represent key scalability elements that will smoothen the transition.
The coming years will not just be about businesses scaling and expanding. Enterprise and managed service providers will also not only see the need to expand but be able to do so through more cost-effective and instantaneous methods.
Through a new initiative, Zadara will look to spearhead the disruption of the market status quo and break down conventional limitations enabling Managed Service Providers to expand and scale quickly and affordably. The Federated Edge is an initiative of Zadara’s that is still within its infancy but has already garnered plenty of traction thanks to its unique approach of pooling resources and sharing infrastructure which would essentially enable a local Managed Service Provider to go global virtually instantaneously and at a fraction of the cost.
Whether you are a business in its infancy looking to scale locally, a thriving enterprise looking to go global, or even a Managed Service Provider looking to expand its market, one thing is certain – the right cloud tech approach could be the difference between a cost-effective, efficient and successful endeavour and failure. So choose wisely.
