Managed IT
What are the most sought-after cloud solutions among businesses today? Find out with this infographic that shows you the top 10 solutions.
Blog Post
7 minutes
Nov 12, 2021
It will not come as much of a surprise to most business owners and decision makers that cloud services have seen rapid growth in recent years as organizations look to shift more and more of their operations online.
But, what are their priorities and what are businesses looking to the most in order to get their cloud initiatives in place?
That’s what we’re going to be taking a look at today with this infographic.
The question for companies as to whether they opt for a single cloud setup (public or private) or whether they should have a multi-cloud setup (public and private clouds) is for the vast majority of businesses a question of which data sets are most appropriate for each.
It’s not uncommon for large enterprises with sufficient resources to operate with data and applications completely in a private cloud, mostly for the benefits of having infrastructure that can be highly customized.
For most organizations, however, this is prohibitively expensive, and so they are more likely to choose a hybrid setup.
This will typically mean using the public cloud for the bulk of their applications and data, while reserving a private cloud server for more specific purposes.
For healthcare providers, for example, they may need to host patient data on a private cloud setup, while using the public cloud to operate their ERP—thereby using a hybrid system.
Let’s take a look in more detail at the top 10 solutions adopted by businesses that are fully cloud-based.
It should not be too surprising that the number one solution in terms of implementation is a website.
While there are still a significant number of organizations that operate with on-premise servers hosting their websites, the majority are today using the cloud to power their online presence.
This is simply because of scalability and flexibility.
Firstly, the scalability of an on-premise server is dictated by the hardware purchased by the business; so if an upgrade is needed, more tech needs to be bought.
This also means that tech will become outdated over time, resulting in old hardware that’s not fit for purpose.
Because of this, websites serviced solely through the cloud are an increasingly popular option for companies today.
Coming in just behind cloud websites are email solutions.
Like websites, the need for an email service is ubiquitous among businesses today, so it’s not too surprising that it should be so high up the list as companies ditch on-premise apps for the cloud.
Communications platforms have become a more prominent aspect in the operations of businesses than ever.
When we talk about communications solutions, we’re for the most part referring to unified communications as a service (UCaaS) apps, like Teams and Zoom.
UCaaS services have grown in significance since COVID pandemic, and with businesses offering flexible working circumstances more than ever, these solutions will continue to play a part long into the future.
We should also note that UCaaS solutions have been growing in popularity in any event, owing to their ability to break down data silos within companies and allow ease of communications across all lines of business.
Mobile services comes in as one of the most sought-after solutions from businesses.
This is primarily because of the need from organizations to better accommodate mobile users and the viability of custom mobile applications as something for SMBs to pursue.
Consumers use their phones more than ever and from a business standpoint, a quality mobile experience for their customers is a key competitive differentiator today.
Related Post: Why Embracing Mobile User Experience Is Essential to Growing Your Business
Mobile users are five times more likely to abandon a task if the site isn’t optimized for mobile.
A CRM (customer relationship management) system is a key component of a modern sales and marketing strategy.
They allow businesses to more effectively manage their customer relationships throughout the sales and marketing funnels by aggregating data and information into a single system which tracks their entire lifecycle.
This helps organizations provide a better quality of service to customers and maintain relationships more effectively, all within a centralized database.
Productivity apps, or suites, are collections of apps that are bundled together for end users to operate seamlessly across a business regardless of where they are situated.
Popular examples of this are Microsoft Office and Slack.
Vendors are moving away from the traditional licensing model for their productivity apps in favor of offering them as a unified cloud service.
Many businesses today still operate with older versions of productivity apps, but the increased adoption of these suites makes it a popular consideration for companies implementing new technology initiatives.
These solutions are especially useful for businesses with multiple offices or remote workers, as employees can collaborate on files instantly through the platform from anywhere or on any device.
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions, like productivity suites, are a priority for organizations that want to eliminate silos within their operations.
ERPs effectively serve as the backbone to a business’ data infrastructure, unifying different platforms from across a company to a single point-of-use.
This helps bring together common ERP modules, like finance, marketing, human resources, sales, inventory, and more under one system.
The scalability of cloud ERPs has meant that businesses are more and more willing to replace their legacy on-premise systems with alternatives like Dynamics 365 through the cloud.
Related Post: Is Your Business Ready for ERP Implementation?
ERPs offer excellent opportunities to automate key business processes and streamline flows and functions into a unified and cohesive system—95% of companies report improvements in their processes after ERP implementation
Data analytics is quickly emerging as a field which attracts not just enterprise organizations, but SMBs too.
Platforms like PowerBI, which can be readily integrated into a cloud ERP platform, means businesses have more opportunities to effectively leverage their data than previously possible.
A study by Gartner found that more than 87% of businesses were classified as having low business intelligence (BI) and analytics maturity.
While the business world as a whole has been relatively slow to implement analytics capabilities into their operations, changes are coming quickly, with most—if not all—decision makers recognizing the importance of data analytics and business intelligence to their future.
Dresner found that over half (54%) of all enterprises say cloud BI is either critical or very important to their ongoing and future initiatives, and this is one cloud solution that we can expect to make big gains in the coming years.
Document management is of more importance to some organizations than others depending on their industry, perhaps more than any of the other solutions listed here.
The need to digitize document workflows is a pressing issue for several industries, especially those that deal with significant amounts of paperwork on a daily basis, like law firms and insurance companies.
Reducing reliance on paperwork is a “quick win” in terms of lowering waste, and digitizing document processes allows for far more efficient workflows within businesses that deal with a heavy volume of paper.
A study found that 22% of an employee’s time is spent on repetitive tasks. Over the course of a year, you can imagine how much money is wasted by workers spending time on manual tasks that can now be automated.
As data proliferation continues to expand and grow, the amount of information housed by businesses that needs to be securely stored grows in turn.
This is particularly the case when it comes to unstructured data, which can often be sensitive and high in volume.
Unstructured data collectively accounts for 80-90% or more of all data and is continuing to grow.
As these big data sets grow exponentially, it becomes untenable for organizations to keep them stored in-house, and so they seek cloud database servers for their needs.
At the moment, this large increase is being driven by enterprise and medium-sized businesses for the most part, but as data proliferation continues, we can expect to see more SMBs adopt these fully cloud-based servers.
We hope this infographic has given you a good understanding of what solutions are the most desired by businesses today.
As more organizations see the value of adopting a fully cloud-based setup for their operations, we will continue to see the growth of cloud apps and platform adoption rise.
If you’d like to learn more about the different cloud hosting options and which one is the best fit for your organization, access Impact’s eBook: Which Cloud Option Is Right for Your Business?
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