When a team takes the court, a key deciding factor in its performance is preparation. NCAA’s March Madness is upon us, so over the next few weeks, college basketball teams that have prepared and built a successful infrastructure throughout the season will be the ones surviving and advancing. Your professional team can deploy some of the same lessons and strategies to win business by employing a well-prepared cloud infrastructure. Remember the following strategies and your organization will experience winning results:
- Enjoy Playing on the Road: NCAA Tournament games are played away from home. In order to advance, teams must be up to the challenge of playing away from their campuses. Cloud solutions allow businesses to conduct normal operations anywhere, whether in an airport, on-site at a conference or when employees work remotely as a result of inclement weather or travel assignment.
- Eliminate Turnovers: Turnovers, especially in late-game situations, can be the difference between a college basketball team winning or losing in March. Eliminating the risk of turnovers, i.e. loss of data, with virus protection and fire walls and a multi-layer backup system for redundancy is the difference a cloud solution makes. Since data is the lifeline of any business, a turnover—whether caused by virus, natural disaster or inadequate protection—could jeopardize an organization’s relationship with clients, resulting in a decrease in profits or a loss on the company’s bottom line.
- Employ the Full Court Press: A full court press is a defensive tactic teams employ to defend opponents for the full length of the basketball court. When businesses employ cloud solutions, the cloud provider’s staff members become full court defenders by taking over IT responsibilities and providing businesses valuable “end-to-end” coverage. As result, this defensive strategy allows businesses to focus solely on their day-to-day operations.
- Take Advantage of an Up-tempo Pace: In a basketball game, fast-paced play results in more possessions, yielding more points. Finding a cloud solution that guarantees negligible downtime yields the same level of productivity. Businesses benefit by conducting normal operations without the risk of downtime, which results in more time for billable hours.
- Show Adaptability: College basketball teams that adapt to changes in venue, style of play and their opponents increase their chances of advancing far in the NCAA Tournament. When businesses rely on the cloud to host applications and data, they are depending on a solution designed with the flexibility to adjust to the normal ebbs and flows of business. For example, during tax season, accounting firms need to add personnel and work additional hours, just like associations must add staff to effectively manage annual conferences and conventions. With the cloud, these and other businesses and organizations can address seasonal changes and adjust accordingly.
Success on the basketball court is a far contrast to success in the business world, but incorporating the techniques mentioned above can set your businesses up to achieve whatever goals are put in place.