Engaging the right cloud partner: a before & after comparison

If you’re like many small to medium-sized enterprises in Southeast Asia, the pandemic has pushed your business to a crossroads. Technology updates like cloud migration or data modernization that were once on the “nice-to-have” list have been moved up to the top of your priorities. Inefficiencies that caused little disruption in the past are now creating a drag on business operations that can’t be tolerated.

However, if not carried out with an experienced cloud partner, digital transformations can potentially drive more costs and inefficiencies than before they were even started. In order to paint a clearer picture of how to proceed, we’ll discuss how your business might look before and after engaging a cloud partner.

Situation 1: Efficiency and manpower 

Before engaging a cloud partner

At this stage, your entire cloud infrastructure is run by a small IT team and you do not have the budget to increase your headcount. Time for important tasks like assisting employees with serious network issues is being eaten up by items like monitoring downtime, updating software, or allocating cloud resources. A report from Flexera found that up to 35% of cloud spending by businesses is wasted due to inefficiency alone.  

It’s a huge undertaking for a small team to manage an entire cloud environment, which results in inefficiencies and unnecessary costs. The complexity of cloud services can also be an issue, especially if your business has recently moved to a hybrid working model with employees more reliant on cloud applications.

After engaging a cloud partner

With a reliable cloud partner and firm SLA (Service-level agreement) in place, you and your IT team now feel a tremendous burden has been lifted. Work items that were draining resources such as optimizing cloud performance and reviewing new cloud products have been offloaded to your cloud partner.

Working with a cloud partner is basically the equivalent of outsourcing your excess IT and cloud needs to an external team. Because your cloud efficiency is their total focus, a cloud partner can commit all of their resources to monitoring your cloud environment. This includes daily processes such as updating, archiving, and application management, as well as ensuring all processes are fully optimized at all times.  

Situation 2: Data management

Before engaging a cloud partner

Your company is generating huge amounts of data on a daily basis, like customer inquiries, internal documents, or online transactions records. Your IT team is racing to maintain good data management practices, which cover everything from engineering tasks like data ingestion and cleaning data to storing and organizing work like moving it into a data lake or warehouse. Without a well-built data pipeline, IT staff are struggling to keep up.

If the above is an accurate description, your company is sitting on a huge amount of unstructured data, or data that is stored in its native format without any predefined structure such as a table or graph, making it extremely difficult to analyze. This is especially likely if you are in a consumer-facing sector like online retail, where constant web-based transactions rack up high amounts of data in a limited time. As of now, this data is doing nothing but taking up space in your database.

Unstructured data can range from textual to non-textual formats such as a video, audio, or images. According to statistics, over 80% to 90% of enterprise data is unstructured, with the amount growing at a rate of up to 65% per year.

After engaging a cloud partner

One of the first things your cloud partner will assist you with is building an effective, cloud-based data pipeline that can scale to your ever-increasing data volume. This means that before that data is shipped downstream to your newly-created data lake or warehouse, it is processed and cleaned so that the system can make the best use of it.

However, the value of engaging a cloud partner goes much further than just organizing, migrating, and maintaining data. A cloud partner can provide your business with clear strategies on how to use that data to develop machine learning (ML) algorithms and automate internal processes.

Now, instead of all that actionable information sitting latent in a data warehouse, you can access visualized insights via business intelligence tools like Google Looker and Looker Studio, allowing for faster and more effective decision-making. What’s more, you are enhancing your marketing through AI/ML-generated customer behavior models and even monetizing the data itself through APIs, creating a whole new revenue stream!

Situation 3: Cloud security 

Before engaging a cloud partner

Unless you are a large organization with vast capital reserves, a single cyberattack can be devastating for your business, and the risks are growing by the day. According to an assessment by Kaspersky of cyberattacks on small businesses in 2022, Trojan-PSW(Password Stealing Ware) detections increased by almost a quarter compared to the same period in 2021, while the number of attacks by malicious programs in the first four months of 2022 exceeded the total number for the previous year. 

Therefore, it’s not hard to understand why your IT team is losing sleep over whether all of your cloud services and applications are up-to-date, as one missed update can create huge vulnerabilities.   

After engaging a cloud partner

With your cloud partner  now on top of your cloud security, your IT team can finally have proper rest. Your cloud partner is using their expertise to keep your company on top of all security standards and scaling as needed. For example, for clients who use our managed service, CloudMile actively provides services like 24x7 monitoring and anomaly detection.

At CloudMile, we cooperate closely with our clients to build an internal consensus on identity management, governance policies and security settings. What’s more, we work with industry-leading security experts like CloudFlare to provide you with the highest level of protection against DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks and other threats.

Solution 4: Cloud spend

Before engaging a cloud partner

As businesses expand the range of cloud services that they use, pricing models can become increasingly complex and lead to wasted cloud spend. Is your business using a subscription model? Then it’s possible that you are paying for redundant services that contribute nothing to your business. If it’s a pay-per-use model, then service usage that goes beyond the original plan might be draining your IT budget.

You may also lack visibility into whether your employees are using cloud services correctly, or using the correct ones at all. This lack of oversight can create inefficiencies and contribute to your company being billed more per second.

After engaging a cloud partner

Your cloud partner has set up a single-pane view of all of your cloud services and spend, allowing for easy monitoring of items such as service usage, billing trends, monthly invoices, and tracking of support tickets. Not only is cloud spend at your company fully under control, but you are seeing increased savings in your balance sheets.

Our Cloud Management Platform, MileLync, offers all of the above services. We can also provide you with Billing-as-a-service, an efficient way to optimize cloud spend that includes an annual infrastructure review.

Why CloudMile is your ideal cloud partner

By working with a managed services partner like CloudMile, you can transform your business from being reliant on legacy processes to becoming a forward-thinking frontrunner in your industry. We can help you change your unstructured data into visualized, actionable, and growth-powering insights.  

Besides holding Google Cloud Managed Service Provider certification in Singapore and other markets, CloudMile has 130 GCP technical certifications along with four specializations.

Take your first step on your digital transformation journey with CloudMile by clicking here.