What does your Business Do?
If you were to go to the CEO of the Aerospace company I worked for in my first job fresh out of University and asked him what his business did, he would probably say “We make buttons, switches and panels for aircraft.”
If you were to ask one of the Progress Chasers what the business did, they would tell you that they designed buttons, switches and panels for aircraft, ordered and tracked the materials, quality assured the materials, machined them, adapted them, and then built the buttons, switches and panels.
Once built they were then rigorously tested before being shipped out to customers. Every component had a full audit history so that in the event of an aircraft failing, even the smallest button or switch could be tracked to the individual consignment of raw materials from which it was constructed.
This was all managed by an IBM Mainframe.
More than Just Buttons
In other words, the business did an awful lot more than just “make buttons, switches and panels for aircraft” and the success of the business depended on all of those activities.
At the turn of the Century, if you asked senior managers at Nokia what their business did, I’m pretty certain they would say “we make phones”.
If you asked some of the key workers in the business, they would tell you that they also designed and built the software that made those phones work and so when Nokia decided to “cut costs” by handing over the software development to third party suppliers where it could be developed more cheaply, they gave away half of their product.
As their customers adopted the new wave of smartphones, Nokia was unable to pivot fast enough because they had lost the internal resources to build or integrate completely new software.
Don’t Undervalue your Assets
The moral of the story being, don’t lose site of the other components and activities that are critical to the delivery of your end product and the success of your business.
The Cloud is an exciting opportunity for business and makes available a whole plethora of features and capabilities that would otherwise cost SMEs a small fortune. It can be a powerful ally and facilitator in sustained viability and growth. Your IT infrastructure is critical to the success of your business and you need to be careful not to give away mission critical components of your product and business facilitation when you migrate to the cloud.
Cloud Partners will work with you to migrate your business to the Cloud, they will listen to your requirements and devise a migration plan, perform a proof of concept and facilitate your migration without it impacting your day to day business.
Once that has been done, you will want the option of taking back the reigns.
We Empower You
In that event, your Cloud Partner will train your staff and help them understand and work with your new platform. Your business and your staff will be empowered to manage and control your own Cloud infrastructure with the knowledge that your Cloud Partner is on hand to assist and advise with or actually undertake any changes as and when they are required.
The most important thing to us is that when you engage 1Tech, we work with you and we empower you. We develop long term relationships with our clients so that we can help them achieve their goals without undermining their business freedom.
John Dunning works for 1Tech, an AWS Cloud Partner.