News in the Channel - November 2022

ADOPTING CLOUD TECHNOLOGY

Trends One of the current trends among customers, which is borne out of good practice, is to migrate the lowest-risk, lowest-value apps to the cloud first to assess the new infrastructure, Steve adds. “Once established, the most mission critical apps and services can be moved across. Customers are demanding ease of migration, with limited disruption to the business and the assurance of business continuity throughout the entire migration process.” Raymond adds that with hybrid working now the norm, businesses of all sizes are moving more of their critical business infrastructure online and using hybrid cloud solutions. “This enables businesses, especially SMEs, to scale their workloads based on compliance, policy, and security requirements while replicating business-critical data to the cloud,” he says. “We have seen more businesses across different industries – such as retail, financial, manufacturing, media and entertainment and gaming - adopt a hybrid cloud approach in order to enjoy the benefits of public and private cloud. Hybrid cloud deployments benefit from public cloud’s agility, elasticity, and cost-effectiveness without compromising the robust data security provided by the private cloud.” Future Raymond adds that demand is growing and will become core to many more businesses in the short- to medium-term. “As businesses migrated their critical businesses online during the pandemic, business decision makers worked closed with trusted cloud service providers to manage their online footprint in a cost-effective, resilient yet secure way,” he says. “Cloud computing and data- based intelligence services are in a pivotal position to capture such growing demand and future trends in the post-pandemic world. “Looking forward, we believe we are just at the beginning of the cloud and digital intelligence era. By providing our technologies, solutions and domain expertise via the cloud to enable the digital transformation of different industries, more private and public sector organisations will embrace and adopt the cloud for their core businesses in the next 18 months.” Steve adds that the migration to cloud services by SMEs will continue for the foreseeable future, but there will be a focus on certain aspects. “Businesses often respond to evolving economic circumstances by ensuring that their IT can support the business to give it the agility it needs to navigate change and challenges swiftly,” he says. “Given the current global uncertainties, we think in 2023 there will be a focus on cloud security, backup, and scalability.”

department. For example, building an enterprise resource planning system in the cloud can simplify business functions, better align teams across HR, production, customer relationship management and supply chain management. By optimising resources and integrating SAP instances, businesses can drive efficiency and maximise their profits.”

Raymond Ma general manager of Europe, Australia & New Zealand Alibaba Cloud Intelligence We believe we are just at the beginning of the cloud and digital intelligence era “ ”

Emphasising benefits These are benefits that resellers need to

emphasise, as is the ability to scale usage of it. “In a way, cloud computing is like electricity,” says Raymond. “SMEs can consume the computing power in a highly scalable way, while benefitting from an ‘as-needed’ payment model. This gives SMEs the option of buying IT resources when they need to. This enables them to scale their computation resources effectively and efficiently should there be a spike in online visits or orders through the store due to unexpected reasons, such as a flash sale, an event or festival.” Steve Holmes, PaperCut’s EMEA regional director and GM, adds that another selling point is its flexibility. “Like many enterprise-scale organisations, SMEs need access to their data in real-time and wherever their staff may be; especially in this era of hybrid working,” he says. “In addition to that access and flexibility, many SMEs will be looking to keep costs down and therefore will be interested in cloud solutions with no additional overheads for storage maintenance and no hardware maintenance. When you hear a customer say they’re looking to move away from servers and IT infrastructure, that’s your pitch opportunity. “While each customer’s reasons for migrating services and apps to the cloud will differ according to the needs of their business, dealers should centre their discussions on the core benefits of data security, scalability and enhanced collaboration. They should also focus on the value of the automated software updates, optimised process efficiency and operational cost reductions.” Steve adds that it is important for resellers to be part of a customer’s journey to using cloud technology and act as an adviser to them, as well as a retailer. “Many dealers pride themselves on their ability to add value, and the cloud migration project is a terrific opportunity to demonstrate how well they can do that,” he says. “For most companies, moving to the cloud will be a daunting prospect because so much hinges on how smooth the process will be, and how effective the cloud will be once the migration is complete. Dealers need to be able to advise, inform, reassure, and address issues swiftly as they arise if customers are to feel comfortable about transitioning to the cloud.”

Steve Holmes EMEA regional director and GM PaperCut SMEs will be looking to keep costs down and therefore will “ be interested in cloud solutions with no additional overheads

”