Cloud Computing: Driving Efficiency and Sustainable Growth (Guest blog from Jumar)

Author: Chris Weston, CDIO, Jumar

To get the most out of cloud tech for supporting sustainable growth, companies must pay attention to two key elements: enabling scalable capability whilst managing costs effectively.

Cloud computing has revolutionised the way businesses operate, offering organisations of all sizes unprecedented flexibility, scalability, and innovation potential. However, to get the most out of cloud tech for supporting sustainable growth, companies must pay attention to two key elements: enabling scalable capability whilst managing costs effectively.

Let’s start with the costs of cloud. Effective cost control is crucial for ensuring that cloud investments deliver maximum value for your business. This starts with a clear understanding of the specific business objectives driving cloud adoption. Whether you're a small startup looking to scale quickly, a medium-sized firm seeking to improve agility, or a large enterprise aiming to enhance customer experiences, aligning your cloud strategy with your strategic goals helps ensure resources are allocated efficiently and unnecessary spending is avoided.

Architecting cloud environments for optimisation is another critical aspect of cost control. By investing in tools and platforms that enable automation, intelligent resource management, and scalability (such as containerisation, infrastructure-as-code or auto scaling), businesses of all sizes can minimise waste and ensure the right resources are provisioned for the right workloads. For example, a small e-commerce company could use cloud auto-scaling to automatically adjust resource capacity based on website traffic, while a large financial institution could use cloud-based data analytics to reactively optimise risk management processes. This helps control costs while maintaining high performance and value delivery.

Robust governance frameworks also play a vital role in cloud cost control. By implementing policies, processes, and controls that provide visibility and oversight over cloud environments, organisations can identify and address cost inefficiencies, enforce best practices, and prevent budget overruns.  All the major cloud providers have these tools available, the question for business is whether they lean on a partner or managed service to get the most out of this technology or invest in their own capability. Poorly managed services often lead to “bill shock”, and a lack of control is generally a false economy.

Sustainable Best Practices

Today, it’s becoming increasingly clear that we must build sustainability more explicitly into our technology projects to deliver tools and services that can stand the test of time. This starts with a focus on environmental sustainability. By leveraging cloud providers' green initiatives, such as renewable energy usage and efficient data centre design, you can leverage this for your own corporate social responsibility (CSR) commitments.

Operational sustainability is another crucial consideration. To keep your cloud infrastructure working properly and securely, implementing robust testing, quality and monitoring processes is an important step.  This includes cloud security or disaster recovery tools, that reduce the risk of service interruption and the potential loss of business or reputation that this brings.

Sustainable cloud practices must also prioritise user-centricity. Intuitive, accessible and user-centred software encourage adoption and brand loyalty. Cloud-based user analytics can be used to gain insights to improve user experience, and an iterative/evergreen approach to your software allows these to be implemented into an evolving and up-to-date service.

In conclusion, cost control and sustainable best practices are well worth investment for organisations seeking to drive efficiency and long-term growth through cloud computing. By aligning cloud strategies with business objectives, optimising for cost and performance, and working to sustainable concepts, companies of all sizes can take full advantage of cloud-based technology.

The key is to work with experienced partners who understand the unique challenges and opportunities of cloud computing in your specific industry and business context. With the right approach and support, organisations can turn their cloud investments into lasting competitive advantage, driving strong and sustainable growth in an increasingly digital world.

At Jumar, we have many recent examples of how we have helped our customers take these steps and deliver immediate benefits to their customers and employees, with positive implications for both the top- and bottom-lines. To explore how you can take full advantage of cloud-based technology, get in touch (https://www.jumar.co.uk/contact-us/).