Why Public Cloud for business process automation

As society continues to navigate the transition into technological advancement, business automation is critical for any organisation looking to evolve and compete more successfully.

Not only does automation prevent the mistakes that can slip through when completing tasks manually, it also lets organisations improve productivity and scale with minimal effort. Ultimately, by automating and streamlining those mundane, manual tasks, staff can redirect their time to improving the customer experience (CX), developing innovative new offerings, and propelling your business forward.

Why choose cloud?

Business automation can include everything from application connectivity to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. In past automation systems, business process automation (BPA) tools were typically locally hosted, creating costs and risk. However, putting BPA into the cloud reduces both cost and risk. It ensures that systems are available to users regardless of location, which is increasingly important in the modern business environment when people are working remotely.

Cloud-based BPA solutions also tend to be more flexible and scalable than locally hosted tools, letting your business grow without requiring significant investment in on-premises infrastructure. And, when your IT team doesn’t have to manage the technology, they are freed up to spend more time on innovation.

The benefits of moving BPA to the cloud are clear. The question is whether to use public or private cloud.

Why choose public cloud?

Many organisations default to private cloud because of perceived benefits around security and control. However, this isn’t necessarily the case and public cloud can offer strong security and control features.

For example, Microsoft Azure is flexible and benefits from a massive security investment. At the same time, the platform takes on the burden of management, freeing up your IT team to focus elsewhere. And, by working with an expert partner like Azured, you can get up and running in public cloud quickly, seamlessly, and securely.

There are four compelling reasons to choose public cloud for your business automation journey:

1. Cost savings

Public cloud lets you avoid costly on-premises infrastructure investments and maintenance costs. Instead, you can pay as you go and quickly scale up or down as your business ebbs and flows. Once your data and applications are in the cloud, you can start achieving process efficiencies through faster, anywhere/anytime access to systems.

2. Security

Public cloud providers invest significantly in security for the platform, usually via a shared responsibility approach. Microsoft Azure, for example, experiences a US$1 billion annual investment to protect customer data from cyberthreats. This means that the cloud provider secures the platform while you secure the data, endpoints, account, and access management. This lets you direct your resources where they’re most needed by shifting day-to-day security responsibilities to the cloud provider.

3. Flexibility and collaboration

As the hybrid workforce becomes more common among organisations, the ability to access information at any time, on any server, means that productivity can increase regardless of staff location. This means automated processes can be triggered, monitored, and managed remotely and staff members can access the information they need to keep projects on track.

4. Recovery

Having BPA tools in the cloud provides business continuity by removing the risk of a single point of failure. On-premise data storage means that one disaster can be catastrophic. Meanwhile, when data is in the cloud, it can be retrieved and accessed easily. Processes can continue to run in the cloud and the organisation can remain productive even in the face of a disaster.

How Azured can help

As one of the top three Microsoft Azure Gold partners in the Australian SME market, Azured helps businesses understand how to fully leverage cloud investments for maximum return.

Our Microsoft cloud experts will work with you to make sure we understand all aspects of your business process; its inputs, outputs and decision points as well as the context in which it operates.

From there, we assess the feasibility of orchestrating the process(es) in Azure, identifying automation opportunities and demonstrating the capabilities of the Azure and Office 365 platforms.

The virtues of the Microsoft cloud combined with our incremental delivery approach means that we can focus first on delivering core functionality and then progressively inject additional intelligence and features as required.

We’ve helped countless businesses make the move to public cloud for business process automation. To find out how we can help you, contact the team today.

Recent Articles