5 big IT trends you can embrace thanks to cloud

For businesses, IT departments are integral both to survival and success. Without a well-deployed and highly organized IT department, a business faces significant risks and operational failures. And the need for strong IT has never been greater. That’s because in today’s cyber age, enterprise infrastructure represents an ideal attack target for cybercriminals. But it’s not only malicious threats that companies have to worry about. When it comes to enterprise networks, other factors like software faults and data management errors can contribute to business-wide problems as well.

“With cyberattacks making headlines all the time, the need for strong business IT has never been greater.”

With cyberattacks making headlines all the time – and impacting every industrial sector out there – businesses are starting to prioritize IT in a way they haven’t in the past. While they were often traditionally siloed, IT departments are now largely being seen for what they are: a central part of company operations, and a facet of business that every employee – no matter his or her position in the company – needs to be aware of. The growing business attention to IT is an important step forward for companies, and it signals a shift toward better preparedness for the threat atmosphere.

When companies are having conversations about the state of their IT departments, there are inevitably certain subjects that recur across different businesses. But of these topics, perhaps none is more significant or widely-discussed than the cloud. For enterprise IT, the cloud represents a transformative platform that offers to boost IT functionality, drive down costs and mitigate risks. The focus among IT departments on virtualized infrastructure has opened up the door to the emergence of some key IT trends that are connected to the cloud. Here are five of those trends:

1. Bring-your-own-device policies: The move among enterprises to virtualized infrastructure has allowed for the rise in company BYOD policies, in which people can use the smartphones, tablets and other devices they already own for work-related purposes. Beloved by employees and productive for business administrators, company BYOD policies are enabled by well-deployed enterprise clouds that are designed to be platforms on which things like business apps can flourish. BYOD is especially attractive to millennials, 70 percent of whom will actively take advantage of the remote work facet of BYOD by logging over 20 hours a week outside of the office.

2. Leveraging of big data: All companies generate lots of data, but what sets a successful organization apart is the ability to harness that information in a way that grows the business. Cloud solutions can play a key role in enabling businesses to make big data actionable, particularly when companies are able to pursue advisory services that enable them to maximize their potential in the cloud.

3. Reduction of physical equipment: Legacy IT is partially characterized by a reliance on physical equipment that consumed space, generated sometimes high maintenance costs and was prone to breaking down. The presence of the cloud, however, is allowing company IT to move away from the burdensome equipment of traditional IT and toward the convenience of virtualization.

4. IT staff focusing on more business-critical tasks: Traditional IT demanded a lot from its workers, and some of this work could be fairly mundane and repetitive. But as companies increasingly deploy cloud solutions, IT staffers are having to focus less on minute, maintenance-based tasks. Thanks to the cloud, they now can instead devote their work to more important matters. This not only improves worker satisfaction, but also drives up overall business quality.

5. Ability to grow seamlessly: Growth is what all businesses aim for. Yet in the past, growth could spell trouble for IT departments, which would be forced to manually adapt legacy infrastructure to meet the needs of an expanding business. With the cloud, however, IT departments are being made highly scalable and can therefore grow easily with the business. As a result, company expansion can now be a seamless process across IT instead of one that IT finds challenging to handle.

With IT occupying a central role in business conversations, enterprise administrators are now looking for a way to maximize network growth while retaining security and good business. Cloud solutions are paving the way for important IT trends, and organizations are realizing that the ticket to IT growth lies in the virtual realm.

Chi Park | Key Contributor

Chi W. Park has over 9 years of experience in supply chain and operations management, focused on implementing Oracle Applications and improving manufacturing planning and scheduling processes. Expertise includes a broad range of areas including advanced planning and scheduling systems, forecasting, materials management, production operations control, finite scheduling, order management and purchasing. He has also served in the U.S. Army for 6 years as an Active Duty commissioned officer in the Armor Branch and was twice deployed to Iraq.