Partner Article

The secret to scaling success? Look no further than cloud

In today’s globalised society, the world is – quite literally – at your fingertips.

Never before has it been so easy to scale a business and tap into new markets across the globe. But of course, ‘easy’ is a relative term. There are still many challenges along the way.

When a customer base swells from hundreds to hundreds of thousands, you begin to lose things that you once took for granted. For example, the ability to quickly redirect your business and keep pace with market trends is much more challenging. Operational costs increase exponentially. And your IT infrastructure, once the bedrock of your business, may in fact begin to limit your growth.

Whether you’re expanding into a new market or simply scaling up a business, moving to cloud is an essential step on your journey. There are a number of vendors, each with their own strengths, weaknesses, and network of partners that can help you along the way – so it’s vital to weigh up your barriers to growth and choose wisely.

Working together

When two cloud leading brands come together to creating something in partnership, that is when customers see bespoke solutions that can really accelerate their own business. 

In the case of AWS, we’ve jointly engineered a solution with VMware called VMware Cloud on AWS, which has offered great value to customers looking to scale up quickly and seamlessly – so much so, it has been recognised in a recent IDC report.

A service called VMware Cloud on AWS is perfect for those organisations looking to move or expand their IT infrastructure quickly, without any changes to their existing operations or in-house skills.

Through seamlessly moving applications to the cloud, businesses can provide access to employees anywhere, anytime. Infrastructure can be smoothly scaled as the business grows. And due to the cost-effective subscription of most cloud providers, operational costs can immediately be reduced.

Best yet, the technical barriers to innovation are dramatically lowered. Software improvements and maintenance are taken care of by the cloud vendor, meaning there is no need to waste valuable technical resources on maintenance tasks. It also means customers get access to the latest updates as and when they are released, instead of waiting months or years for their next update cycle.

Most importantly, customers can focus their technical resources on modernising their applications in the cloud, supporting faster time-to-market of new innovations.

It’s partnerships like this, which provide access to a wide range of partner-developed tools that have been built to address specific market needs, that truly give businesses everything they need to grow.

Growing pains

There are some brilliant use cases of how companies are tapping into these tools to expand and grow their business.

Take Stagecoach, for example. Based in the UK, the well-known provider of bus, rail and tram transportation services needed to add scale and agility to meet future transport challenges. 

To build a more flexible, digital foundation, Stagecoach has transformed its approach to IT, moving away from the ownership and management of hardware; and it turned to VMware Cloud on AWS to host some of its most business-critical applications.

Then there’s Osram Continental, a Munich-based supplier of automotive lighting systems to the mobility sector. The company used VMWare Cloud to very quickly set up an entirely new, ready-to-run IT infrastructure. 

In only six months the system was already delivering; thanks to the virtual desktop infrastructure, the company benefits from time and cost savings, maximum flexibility and centralised management. All of which has been crucial for success for an industry in transition.

888 Holdings is another great example. Based in Israel, the global gaming businesses needed to create a new data centre in Dublin, which offered the perfect opportunity to rethink its approach to IT infrastructure. The company turned to VMWare Cloud to create a secure, resilient environment and ensure it could scale internationally with the flexibility it needed to support its growth even further afield. Like many other businesses in the market, the move to VMWare Cloud was designed to deliver cost savings, strengthen disaster recovery and boost its ability to innovate; and for 888 Holdings, it’s been a game changer.

The perfect partnership

In today’s competitive environment, businesses can’t allow infrastructure to limit their growth. Whether they want to unlock new markets or simply scale up their operations, cloud enables them to uncork any bottlenecks and take their business to the next level.

The importance of partnership can’t be underestimated – and that really underlines the importance of our partner network. By working together with our customers and partners, we can ensure infrastructure doesn’t get in the way of scaling up. And that the only barrier to growth is imagination.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Antonio Alonso Lopez .