Maximizing Cloud ROI: Lean Growth Strategies for Businesses

Similar to an increasing number of businesses, if your organization is developing complete dependency on the cloud by evolving cloud-based operations, there is a lot of scope to optimize cloud spend by strategically leveraging the available resources, which, in turn, helps improve cloud ROI.

To optimize cloud return on investment (ROI), it is critical to adopt lean growth strategies and ensure efficient utilization of available resources. In this article, we will explore five key approaches that can help businesses achieve higher cloud ROI while driving sustainable growth.

1. Embracing Consolidation: Letting Go of Multi-Cloud Environment

In the quest for flexibility, many businesses have embraced multi-cloud environments, utilizing various cloud providers across different departments or teams. While this may seem advantageous on the surface, it often leads to increased complexity, higher costs, and management challenges.

To maximize ROI, it is worth consolidating your business’s cloud operations under one comprehensive cloud suite. By doing so, your teams can simplify management, eliminate redundant services, and negotiate better pricing with a single cloud service provider. This consolidation not only streamlines operations but also resolves interoperability issues, facilitating seamless integration and data-driven insights across the organization.

Here is one case study excerpt from CloudFuze, a leading migrations solutions provider:

A leading communications/collaboration technology company headquartered in San Francisco, California, USA, had been using Dropbox and Google Workspace in parallel. However, since using both clouds created a lot of management and pricing complexities, the organization partnered with CloudFuze to migrate everything over from Dropbox to Google Drive and Google Shared Drives to consolidate their entire cloud operations in the Google Workspace cloud suite. 

2. Effective Cloud Office Suite Management

Another crucial step to optimize cloud ROI is to ensure proper management of the cloud office suite. This entails optimizing user licenses, monitoring usage patterns, ensuring proper data governance, and identifying opportunities for consolidation or cost savings.

By closely managing license utilization, businesses can avoid unnecessary expenses, eliminate underutilized features, and tailor subscriptions to individual user needs. For example, discontinuing licenses of ex-employees can help optimize the cloud licensing costs as and when employees leave the organization. Similarly, it can be highly beneficial for businesses to let go of user accounts that are not needed when migrating from the current cloud storage to a more robust cloud suite, such as from Box to SharePoint and OneDrive in Microsoft 365.

3. Unleashing the Power of Available Cloud Resources

Cloud platforms offer a vast array of services and resources that can transform business operations. However, many businesses struggle to fully leverage these resources, resulting in wasted investments and missed opportunities.

To maximize cloud ROI, businesses must focus on proper adoption and utilization of available resources of the cloud office environment. For example, if your organization has migrated to Microsoft 365 from a standalone cloud storage like Dropbox, there are several advanced features, such as automation (Microsoft Power Automate), that your teams can leverage to better streamline everyday operations.

4. Streamlining Business Processes with Cloud Integration

One of the most significant advantages of the cloud is its seamless integration capabilities with other systems and services. By leveraging apps/services integration with the current cloud office suite, businesses can streamline their processes, enhance data flow, and scale operations efficiently.

The practicality that comes with apps/services integration is that your organization can opt for them only when needed and also on ad-hoc basis. This way, your organization’s finance team can have granular control over additional cloud spend.

5. Upgrading Cloud Office Suite Licenses in Line with Business Growth

The best strategy to scale the cloud office environment as your business grows is to upgrade the licensing model or plan tiers accordingly. For example, your organization might be achieving consistent year-on-year growth and all the teams collectively may outgrow the current cloud package tier, creating the need to upgrade to an enterprise tier.

In such cases, ensure that your internal teams, including the IT and management, perform carefully assessment of the evolving business needs and then upgrade the cloud tiers accordingly. This approach helps you avoid the mistake of upgrading the licensing model at a stage where your entire organization is not fully equipped to make the most out of it.