So, can the cloud help your business?

Can the cloud help your business? That was one of the questions Rackspace covered in the morning keynote, but as the day progressed, it was center to most if not all of the presentations I visited.

Rackspace kicked off the day with why are businesses thinking about a move to cloud? For the most part they look to increase accessibility (speed of business) and decrease cost (TCO). One of the catalysts to cloud exploration from a business perspective is the Big Data movement. The problem for many businesses is that collecting, analyzing, and creating actionable strategy from the boat loads of data sources (apps running on tablets, smartphones, internet of things) available is beyond the scope of what traditional enterprise infrastructure is able to deliver.

The advent of BYOD is forcing the CIO to live up to the same standards and expectations that cloud applications deliver today. It’s almost like an “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” philosophy, but a philosophy that warrants much discussion, planning, and careful execution – especially when intellectual property like corporate data is at stake.

So, can the cloud help your business? If you think about the speed of business and the need to harness big data quickly and with the lowest TCO, cloud will inevitably become your business in some shape of form. Softlayer continued the discussion in their afternoon session “Building Mainstream Private Cloud: What you need to know” to prepare your business to become a cloud business, there are 4 things to consider:

How to get value from the cloud – what do you want to accomplish?
Your type of workload – what do you need to do?
The tools at your disposal – what resources are available?
How to put the tools together – how do these resources integrate together?

It is a model that can help you improve how your company operates using an integrated set of resources to help you do what you need faster and more efficiently, so you can accomplish what you want. Cloud is NOT is a marketing term or reference architecture. It’s an operation model that does help your business. It helps your business by becoming your business.