Five years ago we wrote about how the cloud had changed our business, from the early cloud days in 2008 of tentatively moving project management and then email onto the cloud. Well, a decade on and we’ve moved on, too.
Everything we use, from ticket management to resource control, in-house communication to accounting is all served via the cloud and delivered device-agnostically.
The biggest wins for us are:
- Always-on, location-independent working. Suits us, suits our clients.
- Cost-savings, we estimate something in the region of £500k has been cut from our costs by not requiring large or complex physical infrastructure.
- Peerless client service. We are independently ranked as one of the top WordPress agencies in Europe and that is entirely driven by the on-demand service model we built around cloud services.
- “Greening” of the business. As the cloud moves towards carbon neutrality we automatically reduce our footprint at little incremental cost.
- Adoption of AI through integration, something that can only happen at-scale through the use of the cloud.
- Enhanced security and legal compliance. Naturally, storing large amounts of data has security and GDPR implications. Letting the cloud take the strain, and the expensive compliance bit, allows us to sit back and relax.
Moving to the cloud is no longer seen as risky – when we assembled our first internal communication back in 2003 using bastarised forum software and available cross platform it was a bit of a revelation. Nearly 20 years later and we couldn’t operate without the cloud.
What’s next?
Cloud storage is only the first step, integrating the various services together is the natural next step and we’re most of the way there.
For us, what comes next is the layering of AI onto those services. Bringing greater insight, combined knowledge, and machine learning to millions of unique parcels of knowledge – creating a company-wide “truth” on any given subject.
We’ll also see growth in intermediate service provision, wrapping ever more products up and renting them as packaged services with fast deployment and on-demand availability. Roll on 2030.
