How Cloud-Based Communication is Shaping B2B Marketing
The impact of unified communications over cloud is pretty evident in the B2B marketing world and widespread as well. Operating in the cloud can influence the transaction costs businesses face in the marketplace and how it can affect the buying decision of the prospects.
Cloud-based computing offers several benefits including low cost and low investment, real-time accessibility, standardization and flexibility, and lower transaction costs, asset specificity, and opportunism. Cloud integration allows companies to better communicate and coordinate with their partners, leading to higher and more efficient levels of market integration.
According to research by financesonline.com, 76% of companies are already using the cloud or planning to move to the cloud.
Significance of Cloud Communications for B2B Marketers
Information technology including the internet, computers, and databases play a significant role in marketing. For researchers, the cloud-based platforms are more than just combined hardware and software solutions and can be viewed as communication and information platforms enabling social construction.
IT has various influences on marketing as a marketing channel, communication, and operations medium, a tool for internal organization, interactive marketing, relationships, and facilitator in the diffusion of information.
Outsourced cloud computing is gradually becoming an overarching umbrella that encapsulates platforms, software, infrastructures, containers, and an amalgam of other technologies. Therefore, keeping up with the market can be critical for any B2B business.
The ever-growing and dynamic B2B market provides many tools for open source monitoring, and for communications over the cloud to flourish. The best practices to embrace communications of this sort include source monitoring tools, refactoring strategies, and tools for Kubernetes, assessments of various cloud platforms, etc.
Top Evolving Trends in Cloud Computing That Influence the B2B Market
When it comes to the cloud and its exploring application and possibilities for B2B marketers, there’s an ever-expanding list of tools and techniques that the marketers can employ.
The market leader in the cloud which owns nearly 70% of the cloud market is AWS, and the company was the first to popularize the term ‘cloud computing,’ as an alternative to on-premises infrastructure when it started the sales computer and storage instances in the year 2006. This act was soon followed up by Google and Microsoft. Today cloud communication is evident in many forms and is contributing to business development in many remarkable ways. Some of the extended uses of cloud computing are evidently extending in the form of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), to Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and eventually to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). There also remain many things blossoming in between including artificial intelligence (AI), containers, serverless, IoT, databases, dedicated networking, analytics, business apps, and much more.
Every intersection at the multiple levels of communication that the marketers have with the cloud has its own advantages. In this blog post let’s discuss 7 key characteristics of cloud computing that explain why it is the go-to destination for B2B marketers to build and deploy modern applications:
1. On-Demand Computing
AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and other public cloud platforms make resources available to users at the click of a button or API call. These vendors have massive amounts of compute and storage assets at the ready, inside data centers across the globe. This represents a radical departure for IT teams accustomed to an on-premises procurement process that can take months to complete.
2. A Provisioning for Self-Service
This characteristic of cloud computing is very similar to that of on-demand computing. Marketers, instead of waiting for new servers to be delivered to a private data center, can precisely select only the tools that they require for their developer teams. An admin sets policies to limit what IT and development teams can run, but within those guidelines, there’s always the freedom to build, test and deploy apps as they see fit.
3. Scalability
With resource, pooling comes scalability for cloud providers. Compute, storage, and networking assets can be added or removed as and when required. Thus, the enterprise IT teams are able to optimize their workloads hosted on the cloud and are also able to avoid end-user bottlenecks. Clouds can scale vertically or horizontally and the providers offer automation software to handle the dynamic scaling for end-users.
The traditional on-premises architectures can’t scale as easily. Typically enterprises have to plan for peak capacity and have to have those additional resources at hand to sit idle during lulls of inactivity, which can rack up costs.
4. Resource Pooling
Public cloud providers depend on multi-tenant architectures to accommodate more users at the same time. The workload of the customers gets abstracted from the hardware and underlying software, which serve multiple users and on the same host. B2B marketers who want to speed up their access to resources can rely on custom hardware and abstraction layers to optimize security.
5. Pay-per-use Pricing
This characteristic of cloud computing shifts IT spending from Capex to Opex as providers offer per-second billing. This can often be seen as a positive sign; however, the IT teams need to be careful as their requirements for resources aren’t essentially stagnant. VMs should be of the right size and should be turned off when they aren’t in use. Organizations that don’t practice this, may often waste a lot of money.
This pricing model was once the only way to pay for the cloud. Vendors thereafter have added various pricing plans that provide cheaper costs for long-term commitments.
6. Resiliency
Communication that’s centered on the cloud has a number of techniques to guard against downtime such as minimizing regional dependencies in order to avoid single-point failures. This can a great advantage for B2B marketers who wish to extend their workloads against availability zones, which have redundant networks connecting multiple data centers in relatively close proximity. Some higher-level services automatically distribute workloads across availability zones.
None of these systems are perfect, outrages might happen and therefore, the marketers need to have contingency plans in action. This, for some people, might mean extending workloads across isolated regions or even different platforms. These processes however are cost-intensive and highly complex as well.
7. Security
All the major cloud platforms, to date, have managed to avoid any major breaches. Communications over the cloud are largely secure and in the light of modern security facilities available, the organizations needn’t worry much about migrating their workloads to these platforms.
Cloud vendors usually employ some of the best security experts and are generally better equipped to handle threats than most of the corporate IT teams. For some of the biggest financial firms in the world, the cloud happens to be a security asset.
Wrap Up
In recent years, the pace of doing business has increased exponentially for B2B companies. Amidst the rapidly changing market demands, marketers must keep pace with the rapidly evolving customer expectations. The use of cloud-based business solutions has enabled many B2B organizations to leverage the latest technologies to stay relevant and competitive in the marketplace. Cloud-based software solutions are quite popular because of the scalability, accessibility, and mobility that they offer and the collaboration and communication they infuse.
Furthermore, migration to the cloud for the B2B marketers begins with a low upfront investment & provides them with access to the latest features. The investment made upfront is low and a minimum ongoing cost is required. The modern B2B customers expect a seamless and convenient purchasing experience that the cloud can help them, architect. With on-premise software solutions, the frequent updates get prohibitively costly. With the cloud, the marketers also get a dedicated team of experts who ensure that the industrial best practices are being incorporated into the platform to meet the fast-evolving customer demands in the industry by enhancing the customer interface.
B2B integration has been long neglected which gets a new lease on life this year – in the cloud. Cloud helps B2B companies unleash their true potential as it helps in lowering the total infrastructure cost. Other benefits offered by cloud include cost reduction, pay-as-you-grow facility, unification of B2B with APIs and Integration, Quick B2B scalability, improved user experience, rapid partner onboarding, and hybrid connectivity. The year 2021 is all set to fuel B2B integration in the cloud.
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