I’m quite often asked why we chose a cloud-first philosophy for reed.co.uk’s enterprise systems like mail and CRM. For me, the approach to embracing ‘the cloud’ is an acceptance that most business challenges can be addressed with the attitude, “Someone can probably do this better than I can”.
The cloud harnesses the simple truth that some services are better when investment and expertise is leveraged across huge userbases. This is certainly true of service providers like Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Engine and Microsoft Azure on which developers can rely to minimise their requirement for engineering expertise, while increasing their flexibility and agility.
There is also an amazing range of cloud services for businesses – whether it’s Google Apps or Salesforce or more specialist services like Zendesk, Expensify or Box. Internal teams would be hard-pressed to replicate the impressive usability, global availability and per-user cost scalability of these products.
The availability of cloud services demands business transformation rather than simply the emigration of physical servers to shared datacentres. Instead of a ‘cloud strategy’, there is just an evolved business strategy which harnesses people, services and technology in the most intelligent way.
The most important step to determining your strategy is differentiating which competencies create your company’s own unique value. Once you understand which of your own core strengths to nurture, it’s simply a question of deciding which part of the cloud you will build your castle on.