Most executives and business leaders now know that their company needs the cloud. But if they don’t know or understand the cloud in quite a bit more detail, it can be very hard to move forward.

Dynamic cloud scaling means being prepared for the ins and outs of using on-demand cloud services as your business grows. Just like a hermit crab or a snake, your business is not existing in one stable footprint – with any luck, it’s quickly expanding, which is what you need in order to grow profits and establish your enterprise in the market.

So it’s not enough to just ‘order from the cloud’ and be done with it. In fact, it’s not just ‘the cloud’ that you’re dealing with. Buyers have to know what the landscape looks like. You have to see the cloud as a massively fragmented vendor network offering a myriad of different services and solutions – and then pick the ones that make sense for your business in its current desired state.

Architecture Sprawl and Drift

Even if you use cloud services, you’re going to have to be provisioning your resources at some level. Many businesses use cloud services to support virtual network environments involving virtual machines and containers. What happens over time is that these architectures bloat as the business scales, and there’s not effective organization and oversight – so things go awry.

Then there’s drift – the management of versions and updates and calibrations and clocks and everything else that has to be managed, either in-house or through an outsourcing model. But vendors are typically not going to do it for you – in fact, they can’t. They can offer elastic resources, but they can’t predict what you’re going to need over time. That’s largely the responsibility of the client business (or key consultants!)

Cloud Thresholds

Another big issue in the cloud is cloud thresholds. What this means is that vendors typically offer up to a certain level of service for a flat subscription fee, and then have to charge extra when service exceeds that amount.

So as businesses scale, they’re going to have to deal with the fluctuating costs of things like AWS S3 object storage, Azure or some sort of cloud-delivered ERP or CRM.

If all of this sounds like ridiculous alphabet soup, call  . We help our clients to be confident in the cloud, with consulting services that take the guesswork out of your vendor agreements. We work with our clients step-by-step, explaining service level agreements and helping them to become knowledgeable about not only what they need, but about the industry context. It’s that easy. You don’t have to go back to school for cloud services. Just let us help with the overall planning, and you’ll be able to provision and get resources for your dynamic state.