Many companies migrating services to the cloud are doing so in ways that risk them missing out on a whole raft of benefits.
So says Chris Maclean, General Manager of Business Solutions for Canon New Zealand, pointing to the fact that, since the introduction of the government's policy in 2015 to accelerate the adoption of cloud services, "it's common to see many agencies adopting cloud in a tactical, opportunistic way, with adoption typically driven by support functions such as human resources, finance and communications".
Maclean says one constraint to higher cloud adoption is the perception that digital transformation will be a massive, even overwhelming, change.
"While it might force organisations to re-think business processes, management practices and information systems, as well as everything about the nature of customer and other external relationships, there is no need for wholesale transition to cloud services," he says.
"A tactical, piecemeal approach may well be the most effective journey."
Cloud services have become popular with many private and public sector organisations around the world and Maclean says cloud technology removes the typical financial barriers associated with innovation and digital transformation – because there's no need for physical infrastructure and the operational and labour costs that come with it.
"Cloud-based services also benefit environmental sustainability initiatives by reducing energy consumption, greenhouse gases, and allowing for the dematerialisation of on-premise equipment," he says. "Cloud security also has an edge over on-premise security with proactive threat management, regulatory compliance, data security; and highly available and personalised support.
"It's no wonder organisations are leveraging the investment that cloud giants like Microsoft and Amazon Web Services make into ensuring top-notch security protocols and procedures."
By accepting digital transformation can be taken step by step, an agency can reduce the challenges it faces into more manageable tasks, Maclean says. Working with a third party, that understands and can meet the challenges of the hybrid environment, makes success more likely.
Moving file servers to cloud environments is often an early project, with custom application servers some of the hardest and last to transition. A lesser-known but quick-win opportunity is print servers. Large agencies will often have significant print server infrastructure supporting office print fleets.
"Local councils in New Zealand are proving progressive in this sense, with IT leaders transitioning their print and scan management from their on-premise servers, to the cloud with great success," he says.
"Simply moving an on-premise print server into a datacentre or public-cloud like Microsoft Azure or Amazon AWS is, of course, not the answer. This will create new problems, in particular creating new security overheads, yet solve few of the existing ones.
"Just like adopting Microsoft Office 365 as a fully-managed application is generally far preferable to putting existing file or application servers into a cloud environment, the answer is vendor-managed software as a service."
Maclean says uniFLOW Online, a multi-award winning print management software available in New Zealand only through Canon, is currently "well ahead of the pack" in terms of a SaaS Print Server offering.
"uniFLOW Online is a globally-hosted, extremely scalable and secure public cloud print and scan solution that enables organisations with the ability to manage their entire print and scan environment from one location.
"With hundreds of thousands of users world-wide, significant investment goes into ensuring the most secure and reliable environment possible," he says.
Canon's customers range from finance and insurance institutions to large multi-campus universities, to pharmaceutical and defence organisations who value the agility, savings and security a vendor-hosted cloud service can provide.
uniFLOW Online integrates seamlessly into an existing office environment and enhances document and device security through a flexible month-to-month per-device subscription. This means there are no long-term commitments, Maclean says. The subscription can be scaled up or down, at any point, with no customer consideration required for server and database capacity.
Since partnering with Canon, David Ponting, Head of ICT Operations at Whānau Āwhina Plunket says that the change has been "like night and day". "UniFLOW Online has provided a cost saving to our organisation, both in printing costs and operational costs… Having partners that are willing to help us on that journey is a big win for us."
When it comes to considering cloud-based services for print, it's important to understand whether the solution aligns with the New Zealand government's direction on cloud, if it follows the zero trust principles and what potential cost and efficiency savings an agency can achieve.
To learn more, download Canon’s guide to cloud-based print management services for government here.