5 Mantras for Building a Successful Cloud Business

Building a successful cloud business is not easy, and your choice of platform and technologies plays a decisive role in that. Hence we thought that we would put together some critical mantras for the same.

1. Build using open technologies – Gone are the days when service providers could deploy proprietary stacks from large vendors and still make money. Amazon, Azure and Google built their cloud on open technologies; so should you! Adopting an open architecture gives you immense benefits:
   1. Keep costs low – Leveraging open-source software and commodity hardware helps you keep your input costs low and build a competitive business case. Based on our experience, the savings are to the tune of 40-50% viz-a-viz proprietary stacks.
   2. Avoid vendor lock-ins – Proprietary stacks from leading IT vendors appear very promising initially. However, in the long run, they lock you into their ecosystem, leading to a lack of innovation and escalating costs.
   3. Maximise business margins – While your input costs are significantly lower than the competition, you can continue to charge market rates and maintain high gross margins.
   4. Ensure long-term competitiveness – If and when competition intensifies, you can go ahead and provide discounts to your customers without worrying about profitability.
2. Address maximum IT needs – While Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is the mainstay of any cloud business, your platform should also offer a digital marketplace to enable you to extend your services and offer PaaS and SaaS solutions. This will ensure that you are addressing the maximum IT needs of your customers.
3. Address maximum use cases – You should build your cloud to address maximum customer use cases.
   1. SMBs and large enterprises have differing IT needs and hence need differentiated solutions. Whether a customer needs a single VM or needs a complex multi-tier solution with many VMs, your platform should be able to serve both in an optimised manner.
   2. Depending on application criticality and security needs, customers would demand public, private or hybrid cloud architecture from you. Your cloud platform should be able to serve all these use cases in parallel without any change in architecture.
4. Leverage your network business – If you are a telco or an ISP, you would already have a strong B2B network business. You should leverage the same by offering Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) as an extension of your IP-VPN/MPLS/SD-WAN services. VPCs allow your customers to run a secure private cloud inside a multi-tenant infrastructure, similar to VPN services.
5. Focus on user experience – In today’s world, customer experience is everything. Hence your cloud platform should be able to deliver multi-service multi-cloud management to your customers in a seamless manner.

We have used the above mantras to help our clients build and run in-country public clouds across the globe. We are sure that these will also help you in choosing the right solution for you. If you are looking for some help in building your public cloud services, do reach out to us.