3 Best Arguments for Cloud Migration for your CIO
Finding a CRM solution that works well with your specific business criteria is not a simple process, but most of the time, it’s only half the battle. It’s important to also secure support and buy-in from leadership for cloud migration if you’re currently running on-premises otherwise all the work you did may still leave you where you are currently—not in the cloud.
As your intermediary, it’s important to find ways to help your CIO maneuver to support your cause because their position is a critical part of the leadership team, helping to align the technology strategy of your organization. Here are three compelling arguments to pitch your CRM cloud migration plan.
1. Increase in Efficiency
Cloud computing increases the ability of your team to innovate. With a cloud-enabled CRM, your team can be more agile in the way it integrates with other business applications. This increased efficiency allows for work to be completed faster because it’s not marred by internal workarounds, ongoing maintenance, and continuous data backups. Data loss is a concern for any business when your information is hosted internally, best practice is to create backups of that data in the case of an emergency, which does happen. With a cloud-enabled application like a CRM, your information is secured against data loss as part of the service and that is easily and quickly managed.
Like your data, security is something that requires a constant watchful eye and that means you need to continually maintain and improve security applications. One of the largest concerns with the cloud, when it became publicly available, was security, but now, there’s more likelihood of your internal security failing rather than what’s in the cloud. Migration to the cloud not only increases security but frees up your team to continually monitor the system and easily update security protocols.
For one, cloud computing-based CRM applications are faster, more agile, and, ultimately, more stable. If something goes down in a cloud-enabled environment, there are backups and redundancy to assure that your CRM application doesn’t go down when you’re on a stable platform like Sugar Sell on the SugarCloud (which has an up-time average of over 99%). If something in your on-prem system fails due to internal malfunction, whether it’s software or hardware-based, you either scramble to implement a redundancy plan or troubleshoot until it’s back up. That can reduce the ability of IT teams to increase innovation especially if they’re faced with aging hardware that increases the risk of something going down. This is why this is a large argument for cloud migration of your CRM.
2. Decrease in Budgetary Costs
This is probably one of the easiest ways to convince your CIO that there is a business use case for cloud migration of your CRM. Internal resources to support applications are expensive and it’s a big reason that people want to move to the cloud. Cloud-enabled applications can reduce the internal deployment costs that come with launching and maintaining new solutions. By migrating to the cloud with your CRM, you’re not only reducing your technical debt but also internal hardware costs.
With cloud-enabled platforms, you don’t have to rely on the maintenance and hardware investment internally. With platforms like SugarCloud, your CRM provider accepts that responsibility which frees up your internal resources to be dedicated to other applications and technology. Manual processes that have to occur via on-premise architecture are limited by the amount of computing power that you have in-house. Thus, that also limits the ability to innovate in your company because you are limited by hardware restrictions. Meaning that if you need to expand for a limited amount of time, it’s going to cost you less than investing in new hardware to support it internally. The increased flexibility of cloud-enabled technology is one of the best arguments to support cloud migration for your CRM because not only does it help to fit the continually changing needs of business but also, it helps to decrease overhead costs often eaten up by internal hardware investments and specialized IT staff.
As another consideration here, it’s important to note that internal hardware can also age, and like most hardware, it doesn’t age well. Deploying new technology on aging infrastructure places additional strain that can also increase the investment needed on the front-end of the initiative. With a platform like SugarCloud, all the upgrades for hardware are also handled external to your organization making that one less thing to worry about.
3. Technical Debt Reduction
One thing that plagues IT teams is the idea of technical debt. Stepping back, often when dealing with software, there is the idea of cruft—redundant extra code, software, or hardware that is inadequate to the task needing to be performed. This cruft limits forward momentum, bogging down IT teams and complicating advancements and expansion. The idea of thinking about these problems in a financial way was developed by Agile Manifesto co-author, Ward Cunningham, in the 1990s because the extra effort needed to lift and shift by teams was increased by cruft and needed additional consideration.
Often, under time constraints, software and internal reliant applications can be rushed to launch, with a plan to revisit after launch and optimize. This process is akin to a loan, just in direct relationship to your technology and the time spent on optimizing and fixing those accelerated launches is, in essence, technical debt. In today’s world, where often there are areas that were not optimized internally, they are bogged down by cruft that makes it difficult to expand and implement large initiatives without a great deal of work and effort.
Cloud migration of a CRM system helps your organization work toward technical debt reduction. How? With cloud migration there’s an ability to optimize code as it’s translated to a new platform and reduce the redundant and outdated hardware that may be currently supporting your CRM internally. It’s not an instant solve but cloud migration allows organizations to evaluate their current technical debt and solve the issues of what is making them less agile and innovative in their current applications. Cloud migration allows organizations to remove the element of technical debt based on hardware and to highlight which areas of development need to be optimized while transitioning giving them not only a chance to review code and applications that may have sat in the queue but never made it to the priority list.
By relieving some of the technical debt within your organization through cloud migration of the CRM, you also create a momentum that sparks agility and innovation internally allowing faster movement on new projects and elements while eliminating the workarounds that were previously required. By removing some obstacles that may have seemed insurmountable due to the amount of technical debt your organization has, you also create a pathway to continue this process of technical debt elimination.
Chances are, your CIO will see the benefits of cloud migration of your CRM but these arguments allow them to build a business use case that allows them to sway other stakeholders to the idea. With more and more emphasis on cost-optimization and increased efficiency, moving your CRM to the cloud just makes sense.
