By Vaughn Hughes, Cloud Solution and DevOps Architect at MAS Global Consulting
There’s no denying that cloud computing – simply put, the delivery of computing services over the internet – has revolutionized how businesses operate in the 21st-century workplace. This technology has freed them up to be more flexible and agile, enabling them to adapt timeously to changing market conditions.
According to Forbes, businesses that embrace cloud-based solutions “gain the ability to respond nimbly to market dynamics, pivot when necessary, and seize opportunities quickly”.
All of this is true – the cloud truly is a business game-changer. It provides packaged services and solutions that were previously considered difficult – or even impossible – for large companies to implement.
But how do you determine what kind of cloud solution your business needs? Should you just close your eyes and pick one, and then cross your fingers that it will meet your business’s unique requirements?
There is no one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter approach to cloud computing. We’ve also found that businesses frequently don’t fully understand what they’re looking for. Perhaps a particular trend has caught their attention, and they want to jump on the bandwagon.
Large-scale solutions that are easy to understand
Here, the paradox is that when assessing their IT needs, businesses should be making roadmap decisions that will give them a strategic advantage but can get lost in trying to understand what is already in place, how they can leverage it and what still needs to be done.
Ideally, before implementing anything new, they need to better understand and manage their existing complex IT infrastructure, whether purchased or custom-developed. So, how to “tame”, expand, adapt and really benefit from your cloud solutions? Here, enlisting expert assistance is vital.
For example, integrating and benefiting from large language models is a huge focus in just about any enterprise at the moment. It’s like a modern-day gold rush, and everyone’s rushing to cash in. But companies need to realize that effectively leveraging machine learning depends on having enough coherent, meaningful data from which to draw insights. MAS Global Consulting can help in all of these areas – cloud, data and AI.
At MAS Global, our experience with cloud architecture, development and support goes far beyond the typical small-scale cloud solutions most vendors provide. As evidenced by what we’ve accomplished for building technology multinational Johnson Controls, we are able to provide large-scale solutions that are organized, supportable and understandable, and that benefit from complete consistency due to advanced DevOps services accompanying the cloud solution. Providing a cloud solution of more than 5 000 distinct cloud resources isn’t possible any other way.
Having been in the software industry for 35 years, the last eight of which have been at MAS Global, I’ve worked with just about every aspect of software – and I’ve always enjoyed being hands-on with solving challenging problems.
That’s what gets us up in the morning: helping our clients deliver real value to their customers – and being hands-on enough to make a real difference. I’ve never been a fan of “ivory tower” architecture, with pretty pictures and slides that are divorced from the realities of actual business goals and the context of existing IT solutions. We like to roll up our sleeves and move out of the boardroom into the practical world of making cloud-hosted solutions advance your business’s strategy and increase its profitability.
At Johnson Controls Incorporated (JCI) – a global corporation to which MAS has been delivering development, data and cloud services for over a decade – we relish tackling those challenges every day. Our MAS and JCI joint teams have successfully leveraged Microsoft Azure and cloud-native technologies to help generate billions of dollars in revenue.
At JCI, the small team of architects I’m part of oversees hundreds of distinct applications, dozens of Scrum teams and thousands of interconnected cloud resources. This, I believe, has undoubtedly helped Johnson Controls maintain its competitive edge in the “smart building” manufacturing sector.
Five benefits of adopting cloud-based solutions
With this in mind, what are the benefits to companies of embracing the cloud?
- Cloud computing makes it straightforward to focus on what your business is trying to do rather than how it does it. And it helps when those solutions and services are packaged in such a way that utility pricing and economies of scale make it possible for companies to custom-develop solutions without breaking the bank.
- If you architect your cloud solution correctly, it will scale easily. Plus, you will then only pay for what you use, and not for a pile of infrastructure that will very likely end up being underutilized. Whereas in the “old” days it was a major undertaking to maintain all that data center infrastructure, customers of cloud-hosted solutions now no longer need to spend their time worrying about it.
- Moving away from traditional virtualization approaches (like virtual machines and even generic containerization of applications) and onto cloud-native hosting and services gets you into a place where your solution “just runs and scales”. That means you can instead focus on the value your business wants to deliver to its customers.
- The scope of what your business has to worry about will dramatically decrease. But it has to be well thought through and engineered, otherwise a hodgepodge of solutions in one place will continue being just that – a shiny, cloud-enabled mess of spaghetti noodles that a business still doesn’t know how to manage.
- Any cloud solution should leave you with a solid understanding of how you can use your data to your enterprise’s strategic advantage – keeping you ahead of the curve in an increasingly competitive business world.
MAS Global helps businesses get their cloud adoption right. We do more than just build projects in the cloud – our experienced cloud architects also ensure that you land up with something you can understand, that can benefit your customers and that we maintain for you in the long term.
We pride ourselves on working end to end with all aspects of a cloud architecture solution, from conception, requirements and architecture all the way down to building, testing, deploying, operating and monitoring.
Contact us to discuss your company’s cloud-based solutions: info@masglobalconsulting.com
Based in Tampa, Florida, with a hub in Medellin, Colombia, MAS Global accelerates tech projects for midsize to Fortune 500 clients in Finance, Healthcare, Manufacturing, and Technology. Our strategic hubs ensure aligned time zones and access to elite Latin American tech talent, delivering cost efficiencies and superior quality. With a flexible collaboration model that adapts to client needs, MAS empowers clients with AI, cloud, and data technologies, supported by proprietary accelerators. Certified as women and minority-owned, we aim to impact 1 million women and Latinos through technology. Founded by Monica Hernandez, a Colombia native and top 100 Hispanic in Tech, MAS is trusted by industry leaders like Dell, JPMorgan Chase, and Johnson Controls. Featured in Forbes, Bloomberg, and Inc. Magazine, MAS Global is More Innovation, Inclusion, and Impact.