How To Convince Your CIO To Move To The Cloud?

For a company to sustain the unpredictable competition that is waiting to happen tomorrow, CIOs need to be a leader and strategist today. They are no longer maintenance heads, who traditionally found themselves in seemingly shifting job descriptions, taking care of everything hardware and software, maintenance, security, and implementation is all about.

But, any Chief Financial Officer will naturally have questions about huge new technology transitions. Because the cloud won’t happen in the snap of a finger and it involves certain investment, you need to set the floor to convince your CIO on moving to the cloud.

As it seems today, they are phasing through transformational changes; delivering business value in each stage, addressing evolving technology challenges every second, exploring new growth opportunities in a competitive landscape, gathering insights to implement positive change in the company. The CIO we knew yesterday no longer exists. S/he is more agile, skilled and focused. Thanks to Cloud!

Surprisingly enough, some CIOs are still fighting cloud adoption. Reasons? Perhaps, a few questions they are yet to find answers to –

Will cloud deliver more security than my internal data center?

Will my cloud provider be a position to maintain my desired uptime standards?

What about scalability, deployment barriers, and legacy migration challenges?

What if we lack documentation for outdated legacy systems?

Will our existing employees adapt to the Cloud culture?

More importantly, am I ready for the Cloud?

It would be unjustified if we blame some CIOs for their cloud unpreparedness. If they are fighting the cloud, there must be some inherent organization-wide issue as well. Probably the top decision maker has not been convinced enough, or the team comprises of old and tired employees who don’t want to step out of their comfort level or they are finding it hard to explore tangible cloud benefit.  This is where the necessity of innovative cloud literacy comes.

If you are a stakeholder of a company that you think can hugely benefit from cloud adoption because you know and see it works, here are a few ways you can convince your CIO to move to the cloud.

Source: LogicMonitor’s survey is predicting that 41% of enterprise workloads will be run on public cloud platforms (Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and others) by 2020

Many CIOs are not at all bothered about controlling costs. If they see business continuity requires investment, they do not bother money flowing in. In fact, this is natural. Cost control can be a priority, but many a time, it does not guarantee transformation. Delivering business outcome does. CIOs who think on this line have a lot to gather from the Cloud.

If transformation is all about growing steadily, while remaining relevant in the evolving digital race, Cloud benefits a company in the following ways –

It can drive valuable and measurable business insights with advanced analytical capabilities. This facilitates effective decision-making and strategy building. Since CIOs need to take the proactive decision, the cloud is their secret sauce of success.

With the cloud, stakeholders can remotely access files without device, location and time barriers. They also work seamlessly – without strict governance and limitations (if not required). What do all of these mean? Higher productivity, improved collaboration capacities. At the end of the day, the benefit passes down to the customer. They experience improved service and show more interest in becoming retained paying customers.

A huge financial and competitive concern for many companies will be what
they’ll do if their data is lost/corrupted/inaccessible. This can have extensive economic implications, some of which could send a business into falling completely flat. A great thing about cloud storage is that if data is lost on local machines like computers or phones, the data is still accessible. At the very least 90% of the files will be accessible if a network failure has caused the trauma. The biggest advantage is having your
data continually backed up across various servers which can restore anything you’ve lost.

Managing traditional on-prem change is fairly direct:

A typical  “waterfall” approach leads us to somewhere with different kinds of impacts.  Let’s think about requirements gathering. In a waterfall approach, we typically look at requirements at the outset. You revisit them as development progresses. The base for the application coder is everything that is progressing from point A to B to Z in lock-step.

In the cloud …

On the other hand, the journey to the cloud is agile, flexible and iterative.  The sprints for the cloud are very different from those involving legacy data centers. As you proceed with these sprints, more activities will be layered onto previous ones. Your stakeholder’s feedbacks  stay open and flexible to new developments.

It provides elasticity – something, which is extremely important every CIO would believe. With Cloud, A business can instantly provision computing capacity to address spikes in demand

Time has always been money. In today’s digital age, it is gold. When your in-house employees have few low-level tech issues to deal with, they have more time fixing more mission-critical challenges and their ability to seamlessly access files from anywhere, anytime makes them super productive every time.