Traditionally, IT departments focused on purchasing hardware and software, overseeing implementation, maintenance and security, and simply ensuring everything worked. With the cloud, IT personnel can evolve into leaders and strategists instead.
IT must keep up with today’s ever-changing technology, deliver business value, focus on growth and the competitive landscape, identify problems and solutions, and choose new tools to implement. Cloud helps IT spend less and make more, ultimately transforming the department from a cost center to a profit center. Let’s take a look:
Avoid Major Costs
Businesses of all sizes, in all industries, inevitably end up facing the moment of needing to centralize or upgrade their technology. Traditionally, this led to major costs, including those of purchasing new hardware and software, installation, and maintenance. Today, however, the cloud has changed this costly process. The switch to the cloud not only saves the IT team time and stress, but also a lot of money. A provider like RapidScale takes on the responsibilities and costs of purchasing, installing, managing and maintaining the infrastructure powering a business’ cloud solution.
Create Revenue
With cloud computing, it’s much easier to find ways to create revenue from an IT department. IT can put Big Data analytics to work, revamp processes to be more streamlined and find ways to offset costs of operations. IT focus can switch from maintenance to innovation.
Support Strategy
By improving the way the IT department operates, businesses can in turn improve the overall operations of the organization. With successful cloud programs, the better organized and streamlined the IT department is, the more advantageous the company becomes to do business with.
Reactive vs. Proactive
With the cloud, IT can focus on opportunities to drive core competencies that may have a material impact on both cost reduction and profit increase. Mapping IT pains to profit enables quick prioritization and pruning of IT initiatives.
The role of IT is changing, but it’s not disappearing. It’s still valuable and demanding. Implementation of cloud computing allows IT to focus on strategy and higher value and takes the IT department from a cost center to a profit center.
