In the past, organizations depend on sales people to sell their products to a prospect. Everything was on a face to face basis. If you remember the door to door Elexctrolux salesman who knocks on doors selling an appliance or two, that’s the foundation of selling.
But today, there are varying channels of opportunities to sell products to. Selling was limited to geographical capabilities, but that changed because of the Internet. Fast forward to a more recent past, the website came alive with a simple objective-branding.
However, technology can’t be put off, and so do people’s demands.
The Website and its Evolving Function
The website, being Marketing and IT’s joint responsibility used to be one of the cost centers. It was simply a channel that consumers go to for information on a specific company or product. Over the years, the website became everyone’s project and businesses began selling their wares online. Things became a digital business and selling is a global capability. The website continues to become an evolving facet of the business.
Now, the web isn’t just a Marketing or IT project, it’s become a center of operations for businesses. When it was still a way to make a brand statement, business made it mandatory to have one to cover all the bases. After which, it became a point-of-sale experience, where people go to for shopping without having to leave the comforts of their home. Before long, it became a galaxy of interconnected functions such as marketing, sales, branding, programming, software, applications, and a whole lot more!
The potential of a website as a channel for profitability is too much an opportunity to pass up.
The Website in a Persistent Cloud
Just when you’re getting comfortable with your thin clients, here comes the cloud strutting its stuff. Every Apple owner has a cloud account, it comes with the gadget! Personal or for business, cloud computing is here to be the norm of the new century.
Organizations can opt to have their websites and their gamut of applications running on cloud, whether public, private or hybrid. Applications on websites that are on WordPress as an example, are being migrated to the cloud, but should your site be on it as well? How should you approach decision making when it comes to your website in the cloud? Let’s find out.
1. OpEx rather than a CapEx model
An OpEx model has no long-term commitment. A cloud platform is dependent on the usage. In a non-cloud environment, equipment such as servers, storage and software continue to pile up costs which are categorized as capital expenses. But the costs do not stop there, it also has an impact on operations. In a cloud platform, there is an option to choose what you want to pay, thus the pay-for-use system.
2. Future-proofing
One of the staple features in the cloud is the inherent ability to scale your cloud server hosting package, without having to go through the pains of new equipment and management. Ease-of-use was one of the obstacles to cloud adoption, and as a result cloud server hosting providers bank on marketing solutions that go with stress-free management. Now, scaling to grow will no longer be a problem for both IT and Finance.
3. Customized cloud
If you’re running your CMS on WordPress, a plugin should be able to track your traffic, making it predictable. Using this data, cloud servers can be customized accordingly through the hosting provider. Websites and applications can now be replicated as though in a physical server.
4. The same performance sans the physical equipment
When talking about finances, cloud would have been an immediate choice. But IT has to consider its adoption into current systems, workloads and policies. In addition, some cloud hosting setup are difficult to manage, hence the hesitation. Of course, subscribing to a cloud hosting setup takes research, considering data centers and ISP partnerships.
5. Business continuity function
Downtime is the worst that can happen to any company, especially those that have no business continuity policies. But the most important cloud capability is its business continuity and redundancy capability, having multiple servers spread across for applications not just to manage workload but also fail-over instances. It’s even more of a need when you are in an area beset by natural calamities.
Agility in Organizations
The success of IT is not measured in terms of equipment management. It is in the applications that can be rolled out and used according to the functions they were meant to do. However, this is only possible if all systems and human participation are working well together to meet each other’s demands to serve customers. Once this is successful, organizations can make an impact on employees and customers eventually resulting to revenue, profit, and growth.