Channel must retool its sales force to sell to the cloud customer

The idea of selling an outcome – a solution to a customer’s need or a problem – rather than selling a tool or product, isn’t new. Harvard University marketing professor Theodore Levitt is said to have told his students several decades back that people don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill – they want to buy a quarter-inch hole.

Yet, as much as ICT vendors and their channel partners have spoken about it over the past 20 years, they have struggled to make the transition from selling technology products to selling business solutions. As their customers of all sizes start to move to the cloud, resellers not only have the opportunity to get it right, but also the imperative.

The main reason it was hard, in the past, to sell ICT as a solution rather than as discrete products and services, was that customers’ IT environments were complex, with many moving parts and many linkages between their applications and infrastructure. Coming into this environment, a salesperson would need to look at which tools in the toolbox were compatible with the customer’s services and processes.

Cloud changes the picture

He or she would be interacting with an IT department that would assume the responsibility of purchasing products and services from multiple vendors and service providers, and putting them together as a set of business services and applications for end-users.

Now, with the rise of the cloud, the picture has changed.

Today, a sales team that wants to get up and running with a basic cloud customer relationship management solution can subscribe to a cloud platform and be up and running in days. That is a world of difference from the days the sales manager would ask IT for help, which in turn would start procurement of the application and the underlying infrastructure.

The cloud, then, is an opportunity for ICT resellers to embrace solutions selling rather than continuing to sell technology. But, many are finding the old habits hard to break.

One reason for this is simply that ICT salespeople have yet to adapt to the new world. They still think of themselves as selling big-ticket products in long sales cycles, with the hope of a big revenue boost when a sale is closed. They still regard the IT manager or the CIO as their primary customer in the business. But in many mid-market and large enterprises, line departments such as finance, marketing, logistics and sales are taking charge of their own business applications.

They might consult with IT about technical standards or integration, but they want to be in the driver’s seat for purchasing decisions.

Speeds, feeds, brands don’t matter

What this means for salespeople at IT resellers is that they should change how they sell, who they sell to and the way they think about revenue. The first point is that it’s no longer about speeds, feeds and brands since users buy applications and services that answer business needs when they subscribe to a cloud service.

They don’t buy a marketing automation suite and the underlying technology, they buy a way to streamline communication with customers, measure marketing performance and optimise conversions. They don’t buy an accounting package, they want to issue invoices and track payments.

Secondly, the technology has become simpler and more transparent, so business users are driving many of their own cloud application purchases. And thirdly, rather than hoping for a big commission after selling a large system to a customer over a six-month RFP cycle, salespeople need to become accustomed to an annuity model.

This means we’re moving towards a more consultative sales approach, one focused on asking what challenges the business user is trying to address. This means many of the most successful cloud salespeople are those with experience in fields such as financial services, where you’re helping someone manage their lifestyle and legacy rather than selling them policies and investments.

To succeed in the world of the cloud, ICT resellers need to unlearn much of what worked so well for them in the past. For many, this will be hard work, but it is essential in a world where the cloud customer wants to buy business services rather than servers and software licences.

Insulating your business against ransomware threats

The world has been shaken by a massive ransomware attack. Here’s some advice on how to keep your systems safe!

It’s one of the world’s fastest-growing industries, it’s already a multibillion dollar global criminal enterprise and it poses a significant risk to every business’s systems and data. I’m talking about ransomware—a sophisticated type of malware that encrypts your files and holds your data hostage until you pay a ransom.

Ransomware is rapidly emerging as one of the most dangerous information security risks for South African organisations because of its sophistication and because the volume of attacks is growing at an exponential rate. Information security vendor, SonicWall, says that ransomware attacks on businesses of all sizes shot up to 638-million last year from just 3,8-million in 2015.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, meanwhile, estimates that ransomware cost companies in the US alone around $1 billion in 2016, a number that will most likely soar in 2017. We are aware of local businesses who have been hit by ransomware attacks and who have chosen to pay ransoms of hundreds of euros or dollars (often in bitcoin) to recover their data.

Pay up or lose your data

Though it would seem counterintuitive to reward the extortionists, many IT managers found that the cost of rebuilding their systems and recapturing the data would be far higher than paying up for the decryption key. Given that the files are locked behind strong encryption, there is usually no other way to get them back. Of course, since one is dealing with criminals, there is no guarantee they’ll give the files back when paid.

One of the most troubling aspects of ransomware is that it has become so professionalised. Organised cybercriminals are constantly refining their malware to evade detection by traditional anti-malware software and they are also becoming increasingly sophisticated in their distribution techniques. For example, phishing mails with a ransomware payload are often so well-crafted that it can be hard to tell them apart from a genuine message from a bank or telco.Highly targeted attacks are not unheard of. Some gangs have set up slick online stores, where victims can see a couple of their files and then move on to a payments process. Other enterprising malware authors sell DIY ransomware kits on underground forums on the Internet, helping many other wannabe cybercriminals launch ransomware attacks of their own.

Backups are the second line of defence

Though ransomware attacks generally target Windows computers, attacks on Android and Macs are becoming more commonplace. To protect themselves, companies should follow the basics of running up-to-date anti-malware software and training end-users not to open suspicious email attachments.

In addition, they should get serious about a discipline that far too many organisations neglect: implementing and following a solid automated backup plan. As simple as it sounds, a well-executed backup plan will make it far easier for an organisation to recover from a successful ransomware attack without paying the ransom.

In practice, such a backup plan should be built on an enterprise-grade automated backup solution so that it doesn’t rely on humans remembering to run backups. This solution should make regular backups across distributed devices and desktops to provide a secondary store of data – preferably stored off-site – as a failsafe mechanism in the event of a malicious attack.

A robust cloud-based backup solution provides off-site storage for additional peace of mind when on-premise data is at risk. The key is to make client backup so highly efficient and unnoticeable to the end user that they are being protected without even knowing it. This will provide an effective second line of defence against ransomware if information policy and systems fail to stop an attack from landing.

What Inspires You?

Customers no longer need to run their own datacentres, own their own network or even their own business intelligence software – the “Modern Business” is evolving and so are we. At Tarsus on Demand, we often have our heads in the cloud (see what we did there?) and are constantly looking for inspiration to come up with inventive ways for the businesses to operate more efficiently.

We are lucky enough to partner with Microsoft in such a way that feeds our innovative spirit with clever offerings like the CSP Programme, Windows10 and Azure, just to name a few.

It’s along these lines that we asked our staff and resellers to tell us what inspires them and when their first love for technology was felt. They recorded their inspiration in short video clips and are competing in a Facebook challenge based on these clips!

Have a look at their own inspiration, like your favourite and you could also stand to win a R250 gift voucher by commenting on their posts.

My calling to get into the technology game started in about Standard 6, when not many people even knew what the internet was.

– Oliver Niemandt, our Microsoft CSP Sales Manager

Watch the clip and vote for Oliver

My daily motivation is knowing that today I have another opportunity to work towards being a better version of what I was yesterday…

– Anette Oosthuizen, CSP Customer Relationship Manager

Watch the clip and vote for Anette

It’s an ever-changing and evolving field. Being part of it and supplying working solutions is enormously satisfying

– Theo Wilkens, Western Cape Subscriptions Manager for Microsoft CSP

Watch the clip and vote for Theo

The reason I wake up every morning is to strive to do better than I did yesterday.

– Rene Singh, Customer Relationship Manager

Watch the clip and vote for Rene

I’ve been in IT for 13 years and I’ve seen how technology has grown and how the cloud division has taken off.

– Happiness Ngobese, CSP Customer Relationship Manager

Watch the clip and vote for Happiness

 

Related: 4 Reasons to get excited about Microsoft Inspire conference in Washington 

A look at scalability and Azure Part 3 – Machine Learning and Analytic Engines

Following on from Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, where we looked at Linear Scalability and the Scale-Out approach ……

I’d now like to cover some more advanced features such as the machine learning and analytic engines that Azure currently offers.

As this is new to the market, many organizations do not know where to start with this. Businesses are constantly hearing that these are the types of solutions that will drive their businesses into the future and this will make them stay relevant in the market.

We often hear questions like:

  • What is the cost?
  • Where do they start?
  • Do they need to invest in new infrastructure?

Personally, I would look at a very logical approach to something like this.

If most analytic engines are currently cloud based applications, it would make sense to move your data to the cloud, this way it makes it easier to learn and leverage off the services that are built in the same data center that your data resides in.

I believe that all these extensive cloud based services (starting from very basic to advanced), contribute to the true definition of the Scale-Out approach (going far beyond the hardware capability).

Scaling out has no limit and allows organizations to change the way they problem solve and generate new ideals and marvels that may (and are) currently revolutionizing new business outcomes.

 

A look at scalability and Azure Part 2 – Scale-Out

Following on from Part 1 of this series, where we looked at Linear Scalability, ……

When I did some research on the term ‘Scale-Out’, I found that this is very much in line with the horizontal scaling. Most pages that I looked at, had spoken about this in their own words but the underlying message was all leading back to the horizontal scaling approach. It was all based on adding nodes to existing architecture to increase performance and take on new workloads. This was all focused on how to get the best optimization out of your hardware.

Personally, I believe that the term Scale-Out can be pushed beyond hardware and even software. The reason I say this is because with virtualization technologies on the market allowing us to scale hardware and software, we can achieve the same results no matter which Cloud platform an organization uses. Most cloud platforms anywhere in the world can afford you the ability to scale up your servers and increase and decrease your usage on a pay as you use model. This is nothing new and solves the problem of over or under provisioning, however this goes a step further.

Looking into Microsoft’s Azure offering I have learned a new meaning of Scale-Out architecture. Azure has taken the Scale-Out approach far more aggressively with redefining the way in which businesses are able to compute. As most organizations already know, on Azure you are able to scale up, down, left and right with your servers, but they have taken it a step further with their Platform as a Service (PaaS) model and Software as a Service (SaaS) model.

Traditionally, this model was more attractive to ISV’s and companies that natively built their own software and sold it to businesses as a service. This model hasn’t changed. It has just become better and has made it easier for organizations in every vertical to optimize efficiency through this model.

As a very basic example, if a business needs a SQL database for a production workload or a dev test, they would have needed to build a server on premise or in the cloud, install SQL and use it in line with whatever application they needed. Azure takes all of that away with SQL as a service. There is no need to build a server or put an extra workload on an existing server – that is already done. The service allows you to use SQL on a per instance basis and allows you to leverage off a latest and fully updated version of SQL that you are able to use on the fly when you need it. When you are done with the service you simply stop the subscription and you will no longer be billed for it.

No need to build a new server – you are able to scale your application on hardware you don’t own!

With global applications such as SAP, WordPress, SQL and many other software on the international market, businesses no longer need to build VM’s or physical servers to load these applications. They also reduce a much higher cost in time and in most cases no longer need the purchase of applications.

I don’t think that in the near future building VM’s will be irrelevant, but we can look at an approach to use legacy workloads on servers in the cloud and then leverage off the Software and platform as a service models to reduce the amount of machines that we need to manage.

Azure is cost effective and offers you the application scalability that you need. With having your Windows or Linux VM’s hosted with Azure, you are able to utilize many of the services on an application layer that will no longer require you to build more servers.

If I look at the backup and recovery space, the usual model servers would be to build a central backup server loaded with a management console. With Azure backup, you no longer need that central server because Azure already has a dashboard console for you to manage your backups that store the data. The same applies to many applications that a modern business will use.

In the next part of this series, I talk about the Machine Learning and Analytic Engines. Read more here.

 

Microsoft works hard to ensure its cloud computing platforms can be trusted

At a recent briefing held at Microsoft’s South African headquarters, Microsoft and IDC reps together outlined the current cloud situation, and just how Microsoft is constantly working to ensure that its cloud platforms are secure, regulation-compliant and can be trusted by business. That trust, they say, is vital to the adoption of cloud-based services by business going forward.

IDC analyst and research manager Jon Tullett told the assembled journalists that cybersecurity attacks are widespread, and on the rise. There are programs lurking on the internet, constantly scanning for vulnerabilities, which can pounce on security weaknesses in a matter of seconds.

100 seconds is all you have

He used the example of a researcher who connected a wireless security camera to the internet, which was compromised by malware just 100 seconds later. The most alarming aspect of such a fast attack is that from there, attackers can potentially gain access to the network that camera is on, and from there to much of the data attached to that network.

Microsoft itself says there has “…been a staggering increase in cybercrime including a proliferation in cyber-attacks that range from theft of data through to malware, Man in the Cloud “MitC”, and side channel attacks to co-ordinated spam emails or phishing attempts. Cybercrime already costs the South African economy an estimated $573 million annually and the cost of data breaches will increase to a staggering $2.1 trillion globally by 2019.”

Attacks can lead to closures

And businesses can’t afford to be taken offline by cyber attacks. Tullett says that a single cyber attack can take out a business completely; as much as 60% of small to medium-sized businesses who’ve suffered data breaches have gone out of business within six months of being attacked.

Microsoft is all too aware of these realities, and works around the clock to ensure its platforms are as compliant and secure as its engineers can make them. Each year, Microsoft invests $1 billion in cyber security, culminating in the largest anti-virus and anti-malware service in the world, and updates nearly 1 billion Windows devices worldwide each and every month.

Enterprise-grade security

Every second, the company adds hundreds of Gigabytes worth of the telemetry to its Intelligent Security Graph, including the results from 200 billion emails scanned for malware and phishing each month. This means enterprise-grade security that sets the standard for the industry.

Microsoft also works to ensure that its platforms comply with the local legislation of the countries it operates in. Senior Counsel for Microsoft South Africa Theo Watson told us that for businesses interested in remaining compliant with the Protection of Personal Information Act – some of whose provisions are already in effect – that means continued use of Microsoft’s Azure platform and all of the services it makes available without violating that legislation is possible.

Core cloud tenets

The briefing also outlined the four core tenets of Microsoft’s approach to the cloud, which are all intended to inspire end-user confidence in Microsoft’s commitment to privacy, security and data sovereignty:

  • As a customer, you know how we manage your data. We use your customer data only to provide the services we have agreed upon, and do not mine it for marketing or advertising. If you leave the service, Microsoft follows strict standards and specific processes for removing data from our systems.
  • You know where your data is located. Customers who must maintain their data in a specific geographic location, such as within the EU, can rely on our expanding network of datacentres around the world. Microsoft also complies with international data protection laws regarding transfers of customer data across borders.
  • You know who can access your data and on what terms. We take strong measures to protect your data from inappropriate access, including limits for Microsoft personnel and subcontractors. However, you can access your own customer data at any time and for any reason.
  • Microsoft sets and adheres to stringent privacy standards. Strong contractual commitments back our privacy standards and best practices.

With such a clear and transparent commitment to the security, privacy and data integrity of its users, Microsoft is positioning its Azure-based cloud services for maximum appeal to businesses in an age fraught with ever-increasing cyber risks and legislative requirements.

Read the story on TarsusToday.

[Image – CC BY 2.0]

 

A look at scalability and Azure Part 1 – Linear scalability

Being a Cloud evangelist from an early age, I have always known what cloud is, how to use it and what the fundamental benefits of it are. In the space that I have been in for the last 2 years I have constantly looked at what the feature sets are that drive businesses to the cloud. I have always had the conversation with businesses about lowering costs and centrally managed systems, which save time and allow for business growth through reducing complexity and allowing focus in other areas.

For some businesses this exercise has resulted in costing more than the traditional architecture that they are used to. I have seen that a lot of the time this has been a result of trying to achieve the best scalable solution, as being able to scale has been one of the focus areas that allow a business to reduce costs.

With cloud always being marketed as scalable, I have seen that most hardware vendors market in a similar way, blade servers and blade storage arrays are also scalable as well as most hardware appliances ranging from networking devices to security appliances, but what is the difference in the two types of scalability?

So what is scalability all about?

When I did some research on linear scalability vs the scale-out approach, it seemed that scalability is a very broad term on the internet with regards to the different types of it and what scalability should allow for. The most common comparison that I came across was ‘Linear’ scaling vs ‘Horizontal’ scaling.

Linear scaling, in the simplest words, is the ability to scale up or down (like you learned in school with line graphs).

Horizontal scaling is the ability to scale left or right.

When I looked deeper into this, linear scalability allows us to increase or decrease resources to a server, adding or reducing CPU, RAM and Storage.

Horizontal scaling allows us to add more servers to a cluster and split workloads or take on new workloads.

In my opinion, I believe that this thinking is still very focused on the underlying hardware infrastructure and architecture and in a software defined world, where does this truly benefit businesses?

I am able to add more resources to my server and I am also able to add more servers, but is this not just solving a capacity problem when it comes to over provisioning or under provisioning?

Early in the game, I believe that over provisioning was one of the biggest challenges that businesses faced, they would buy infrastructure to last the business 5 years and barely got to use 50% of it. This means that they paid for 50% of something they never got to use and at the end of the 5-year period, they needed to refresh the hardware as it would be outdated and not supported.

When we are thinking about infrastructure and architecture, there are so many approaches that how would a business know which one to use. The scalability of underlying hardware is always something that first comes to mind and in the true essence of cloud this should be the least of our worries.

In the next part of this series, I talk about the ‘Scale-out’ approach. Watch this space…

Expanding our Connectivity Portfolio – With BitCo!

We are partnering with tier 1 Internet and telephony provider, BitCo, to offer our resellers the ability to resell affordable voice and data services to their clients.

This new relationship means that resellers working with us can offer their customers a complete connectivity-to-cloud solution from a single point of contact. How about that?

BitCo is a national licensed operator that owns and maintains a national private fibre optic and wireless last-mile network. In addition to offering high-speed wireless and uncapped, fibre data connectivity, they also offer high-quality voice-over-IP and PBX solutions to business customers of all sizes.

To take advantage of the full power of the cloud, end-user organisations need fast, robust and reliable Internet connectivity. By partnering with BitCo, we enable our resellers to add connectivity to their product portfolio as part of a complete business solution that eases their customers’ transition to the cloud. The BitCo partnership is a great addition to our portfolio and will help our channel partners to grow their businesses. – Tarsus on Demand CEO Jonathan Kropf

 Working together with BitCo, we will help resellers to leverage BitCo’s carrier-grade network to add new revenue streams to their business without increasing their overheads. We will also back the channel with comprehensive sales and marketing support as well as regular training on BitCo’s products and services. 

Partnering with Tarsus on Demand will enable BitCo to reach a new reseller channel. They aim to provide us with all the benefits of a carrier grade network so that we can easily enter the telecom market and take advantage of the rapidly growing demand for high-speed connectivity.

Staying secure in the mobile-first, cloud-first era – Microsoft

The operating environment for organisations of all sizes has changed as a result of technology trends such as cloud computing, big data analytics, and the Internet of Things. Consequently, the security landscape has also undergone significant change in the last few years, as most companies around the world have adopted some form of mobility and cloud services into their IT environment.

Those who have not, have not only fallen behind in terms of productivity and access to customers, partners, suppliers and staff on virtually any platform at any time, but will also discover that in all likelihood, their employees have already exposed them to services like those by bringing their own devices to work.

In doing so, employees have changed how they interact with their devices, apps, and your corporate data. While they have become more productive, they’ve also created new security gaps for IT to handle. As the number of cyber-security attacks and data breaches increase worldwide, these issues only become more pronounced.

New security threats require a new response paradigm

Traditional security solutions used to be enough to protect your business, but that was before the attack landscape grew more sophisticated and the transition to mobility and the cloud made employees’ interactions with other users, devices, apps, and data more complex. To truly protect your business now, you need to take a more holistic and innovative approach to security, one that can protect, detect, and respond to threats of all kinds, from on-premises equipment as well those based in the cloud.

Microsoft Identity-Driven Security addresses the security challenges of today and tomorrow across users, devices, apps, data, and platforms. Each of your employees receives a single protected common identity for secure, risk-based conditional access to thousands of apps, both on-premises and in the cloud.

Innovative technologies safeguard your network at the front door, while IT pros gain deep visibility into apps, devices, and data activity, enabling them to easily and quickly uncover suspicious activities, user mistakes, and potential threats before they become real ones.

And with behavioural analytics, machine learning, and unique Microsoft security intelligence, you can secure your corporate files and data while empowering your employees to get their work done on the go.

The transition to mobility and the cloud has further complicated the threat landscape, creating new challenges and headaches for IT pros to contend with and creating the need for identity-driven security. This approach is not just a holistic one, but will also perfectly complement your company’s larger IT strategy.

Article written for Tarsus.today by Anthony Doherty – Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft South Africa

Cloud is evolving, are we?

Those internet-connected datacentres have made their presence felt in the world, in huge ways. Anyone who owns a smartphone has used them; popular services like WhatsApp, DropBox, Facebook and anything Microsoft does these days wouldn’t exist without them, and humans the world over consume the services they facilitate every day, often without even knowing they’re doing so.

Business has benefited the most from this new computing model, as cloud applications and the services they enable have helped businesses cut down on expenses by removing any need to run their own server infrastructure, while boosting their ability to deliver results through apps and services from the cloud.

As a direct result of this cloud integration, organisations are leaner and more agile than ever, profit margins are higher, and carbon footprints are lower – all major wins in the 21st century and vital components of running a successful business.

Basically, using the cloud to further business objectives is a no-brainer.

Or is it?

In my time at Tarsus on Demand, I’ve discovered that awareness and knowledge of what the cloud is, and how it benefits business, is not as all-pervasive as you might think. There is still much resistance to the idea of adopting anything cloud-based, especially in businesses that have established revenue models that don’t involve heavy computer use.

A lot of that is because those organisations are comfortable doing what they’re doing, the way they’ve always done it, but it’s extremely frustrating for me when I know, from personal experience, just how beneficial a mind-shift towards cloud can be. And not only that, but I see too how business models that have worked for years are slowly being eroded and undermined by new ones that do everything cheaper, faster and better – all facilitated by the cloud.

Shifting Paradigms

Through this, I’ve discovered what’s necessary to light the proverbial fire under businesses disinclined toward cloud: a mind shift. But more importantly, a mind-shift that comes from the top tiers of management.

Of course, shifting paradigms is a multi-tiered – and challenging – task. First, management needs to be convinced of cloud’s benefits, as it pertains to their specific business. This is the easy part, really – it’s simple to show how other businesses have benefited with case study after case study showing, in detail, exactly what transpired after they switched.

It’s hard to argue with cloud being a smart and financially-beneficial move when company X, which was turning over R1m in 2014, makes the move to cloud and then posts multi-million rand revenues in subsequent years.

And exactly that has happened, many times. I know, because I’ve seen it.

Hard work involved

Once the seed has taken root properly, the hard work starts: management must establish a cloud strategy that is constructed in such a way that it will not only solve existing challenges and streamline processes, but carry the business forward into the future as well.

Essentially management needs to take a hard look at their business, and, with the help of cloud experts, identify those areas that don’t necessarily need help and those that could benefit from having some part of their function or processes moved to the cloud.

The most vital step in this entire process, from my perspective, is for management to buy into the cloud computing vision 100%. Without that absolute buy-in and push from the top down, any cloud vision or strategy will simply fall flat.

The quickest win

I’ve found that often the quickest win, and the easiest way to demonstrate how a move to the cloud is so attractive, is to convert a business to using Office 365 – a subscription-based productivity suite that makes extensive use of the cloud – in place of buying the software outright. Shelling out for that software can be expensive, especially as one license is needed for each computer it must run on.

Office 365, meanwhile, costs a comparably small monthly fee per user and can potentially cost a business a lot less over time if there are a lot of employees needing Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook.

By going for a cloud-based solution, businesses always have the latest version of Office programs, they pay a much smaller amount per year per Office user, they get plenty of OneDrive storage to use as they see fit and they can make full use of Office’s cutting-edge productivity benefits all year long. It’s a win for everyone, and that’s only a small slice of what a full-on journey to the cloud can offer.

Continuous Evolution

And for businesses that have already made the move to the cloud, or have built new revenue streams atop cloud-based services, it’s important to realise that even having had the foresight to adapt to the cloud trend doesn’t mean their work is done.

No, cloud is a continuously-evolving technology, and the services that it makes possible and the ways in which customers consume those services are in a constant state of flux, which is why it’s so important to stay informed of what’s going on.

In the distribution space, for example, it’s no longer the done thing to simply take products to market based on hardware specifications. Before cloud, all that was required was to keep an eye on hardware specs, inform the market of products with newer, faster, better hardware, and the job was done. Well not literally, but in a broad sense you could say that’s what we did.

Today, distribution is a whole other animal; sure, we still sell hardware, but specs aren’t the be-all and end-all. Instead, distribution is now all about the value-adds, the services we can offer our customers that make their buying, owning and servicing experiences as good as they can be. If we rested on our laurels and merely continued selling hardware as the rest of the world caught the value-added services wave spearheaded by the marvellous things the cloud enables, we’d have been dead in the water years ago.

Cloud Enables

The point I’m trying to make here is that cloud is a fantastic enabler when implemented appropriately, and a brilliant mechanism for growth, increased revenues and even a path to new revenue streams as customers find new ways to consume its services.

Cloud lowers running costs, provides rapid scaling at the click of a button, and can help businesses provision services internally and to customers faster than ever before.  Ignoring it or simply clinging to the way things have always been done is simply not a wise course of action from where I’m standing.

While cloud isn’t the answer to every business question, an informed application of its benefits, both within a business’s internal structures and as part of the services offered to customers, can go a long way to keeping the lights on for many years to come.

Cloud is evolving; Are we?

Article written by Murendeni Mbedzi – Tarsus on Demand‘s CSP Product Manager for Tarsus.today.