Building Trust with Business Leaders: Choosing the Right Cloud Services

Recognizing a problem is the first step toward solving it. Whether you’re aware of it or not, cloud services can pose significant challenges for your IT department.

Even if you believe you understand cloud technology and the intricacies of purchasing a cloud solution, many business leaders do not share that confidence. Nearly 80% feel that IT lacks the expertise to guide cloud acquisitions—and they’re turning to cloud brokers for assistance.

It’s time to acknowledge the cloud services challenge and begin adapting to modern business technology. One critical step is determining which services to outsource to the cloud so you can demonstrate your cloud expertise to business leaders.

Certain use cases and outsourced cloud services are better suited to specific migration models. Let’s examine some popular SaaS and IaaS offerings.

The Challenges of Outsourcing via Software as a Service

Software as a Service (SaaS) often fuels shadow‑IT issues. Employees can create accounts and start using on‑demand web services with minimal friction.

File storage and sharing is the most common SaaS example. While services like Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive seem harmless, a deeper look reveals IT challenges such as non‑compliance with security policies, resource inefficiencies, and improper access management.

If you can’t step in as a trusted cloud steward, shadow‑IT can spiral out of control, increasing workload for your IT team and eroding the value you bring to the business.

Beyond basic use cases, many organizations rely on SaaS for customer relationship management. Systems like Salesforce or Pardot promise maintenance relief, yet you still need to manage SLAs, pricing models, and overall business value—factors that can make or break a cloud purchase. Proving the ROI of these outsourced services is essential for earning leadership trust.

The Challenges of Outsourcing via Infrastructure as a Service

While SaaS outsourcing is relatively straightforward with continuous backend monitoring, IaaS presents more complexity.

Its primary benefits—cost efficiency and scalability—make it ideal for migrating large, on‑premises workloads to public cloud providers as demand grows.

Disaster recovery is a classic IaaS use case. A physical DR environment can be costly and hard to scale; a public cloud solution offers broader coverage and rapid provisioning as new applications enter the continuity plan.

Big data analytics and business intelligence also thrive on IaaS. With data volumes outgrowing on‑premises capacity, leaders expect cloud‑based solutions to make analytics scalable and manageable.

However, migrating DR and analytics to IaaS requires deep knowledge of availability zones, cost structures, deployment pipelines, and the competitive landscape of public cloud providers.

It’s a Cloud Services Future—We’re Just Going to Live in It

Listing every possible cloud computing use case is impossible; today, almost any business process or application can move to the cloud. If your IT department has yet to earn business leaders’ trust as a cloud resource, it’s time to evolve.

If you want to learn how to become an internal cloud broker for your business leaders, check out our on‑demand webinar, How to Become a Cloud Broker.