Glossary

Cloud Acceleration

Digital transformation has spread throughout nearly every industry as the world embraces modern technology to streamline processes, reduce costs, and provide advanced capabilities. A significant element of digital transformation for many businesses is migrating internal and external services to the cloud.

However, embracing cloud computing to either supplement or replace conventional systems is no small task. Migrating to cloud services is a data-intensive process that requires a clear vision, the right level of skill, and a dedicated investment.

Cloud acceleration services exist to help businesses embrace cloud computing solutions the right way. Cloud acceleration is one element of overall digital business acceleration, a process that aims to migrate vital systems and services to leading-edge technologies.

What is Cloud Acceleration?

Cloud acceleration is a multi-faceted operation and will vary based on your business needs. For example, a cloud accelerator might create abstraction layers between your systems and the cloud, embrace entirely cloud-managed services, or leverage infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platforms.

Generally, cloud or digital acceleration is provided by a company that offers cloud-managed services. These companies already have all the tools and capabilities necessary to quicken your migration to the cloud and ensure that you have improved performance once migrated.

The end result of cloud acceleration is enhanced internal and external systems’ performance, reliability, and deliverability.

Your improved internal systems help employees become more productive, access cloud-based learning environments, and provide better security. External systems, such as a customer-facing app, will become more dependable and allow you to stay competitive.

What to Consider Before Cloud Service Acceleration

Cloud acceleration services help you strategically migrate services to hybrid or cloud environments, but you should take a step back to consider the entire vision before getting started.:

  1. Gain an understanding of your current cloud ecosystem: Are you using any cloud services? If so, which ones, and will those systems need to be migrated or updated?
  2. Define the endpoint for your cloud migration: Which systems will be moved entirely to cloud services, which ones will become hybrid, and which systems will remain in-house or legacy, if any?
  3. Evaluate the skillset of your current team: Do they have the proper knowledge and training for migration? If not, can you work with a third-party company, or will you need to hire dedicated staff?

Once completed, you’ll better understand your capabilities, needs, and goals. You can then approach a cloud acceleration service or even form your own cloud acceleration committee.

Top Benefits of Cloud Acceleration

Why should businesses consider cloud acceleration? Cloud acceleration aims to streamline your migration process to cloud-based solutions and ensure you reap the maximum benefits once completed. This can provide several significant benefits; let’s discuss some of the most potent ones.

More Dependable Services

An in-house or legacy system will struggle to compete with the dependability of cloud-based services. Whether operating critical systems or providing employee training, legacy systems often suffer from downtime or slow speeds.

Conversely, a cloud-based service leverages geo-redundant data centers so that they’re always available when you need them. Even without an entire data center going down, the cloud provider will automatically shift to servers working as expected if a specific server cluster is having issues.

The result is more dependable services for both your employees and customers. Slow speeds and downtime will be avoided and have a minimal or no impact on users.

Improved Scalability

Using as many system resources as necessary is a core benefit of any cloud-based platform. For example, if your on-demand sales demo suddenly spikes in users, requiring many virtual environments to be created rapidly, your cloud usage will increase as necessary. Once usage slows down, your services will scale back down.

Cost Cutting Potential

Relying on in-house or conventional services often means paying for system resources you aren’t fully utilizing. For example, your in-house phone system might be able to service 1,000 users, but your company only has 500 employees. As a result, half of your telecommunications infrastructure is being used, but you’re paying for all the hardware and maintenance costs for twice as many users.

Cloud computing provides the potential to cut costs on a variety of services, ranging from telecoms to cloud-based sales enablement training. In addition, you’ll only pay for the computing resources being used, eliminating the possibility of paying for idle services.

Cloud acceleration allows companies to quickly migrate to cloud-based services, ranging from providing the infrastructure for their applications to powering on-demand learning environments. Once completed, businesses will have dependable, cost-effective, scalable services.

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