You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing and falling over – Richard Branson

It really wasn’t that long ago that any new business idea or initiative in most organisations had to go through a whole process of internal justification, market research, business case and more. At this point, some kind of significant investment was required in technology – be it in skills, hardware, software or all three.

Then along came disruption. Suddenly, a 6 month cycle to even get to the point where you could start building wasn’t acceptable. By the time you had approval, someone was already out there in the marketplace.

At the same time, we saw the rise of the Cloud and the opportunities of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). Initially, with IaaS the talk was all about it being “cheaper” and easier. However, it soon became evident that the real benefit of IaaS came from the speed and agility it offered and the two worlds collided.

Today we are very fortunate to be in a world where all organisations can take advantage of the Cloud to test and start innovating. If you have a great idea, the Cloud means that you can start today, experiment, learn something and then shut it all down, all for a cost in the hundreds of dollars with no capital investment.

So how do you go faster with the Cloud today? What’s holding you back? Well, to be honest, nothing but you want to go in with your eyes open. Here are a few things to think about to get started with innovating on the Cloud.

Why are you looking for a Cloud based solution? Are you looking to be innovating faster and be more secure? Do you want to quickly experiment with an idea? Are you hoping to move to a consumption based cost model for your technology? Are you looking to reduce your IT spend and effort on commodity activity? Do you want to refocus your team on higher business value activities? These are all good reasons that may take you down the path of Cloud based solutions.

Will it be secure? Security in an IaaS world is a shared responsibility. The Cloud provider is responsible for the security of the Cloud and you remain responsible for the security in the Cloud. All those security related concerns you had in regards to your applications and your data remain and need to be adapted for a Cloud based solution. Fortunately, there are a heap of excellent tools that can allow you to be more secure in the Cloud than you would have been on your own infrastructure.

How will I operate my Cloud environments? Starting out with a new solution in the cloud provides the opportunity to adopt Cloud native thinking to operations. Traditional approaches to operating your cloud based solutions can certainly work but it’s an opportunity to modernise your operationally approach and align with a different way of thinking

At RedBear IT, we encourage our customers to get started as early as possible. We aim to deliver immediate business value and help our customers get started sooner rather than later, innovating on the cloud from day one.

The exciting thing for business is you may find something even better than what you were looking for, as did Australian energy company Origin Energy when they were looking to improve their data analytics capability.

After all, the best way to learn is to get started today.

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