We’re now more than a week into Spring and the end of March has arrived, putting us at three months into 2016. As we move deeper into our Spring 
Cleaning routine, some of us will find interesting items. I know I sometimes find old receipts, used plane tickets, and the occasional USB cable I misplaced. This can be a very fun time of the year.
For businesses of all sizes, Spring is a crucial month for their technology. As we indicated last week, the turning of the calendar is an opportunity to engage in technical spring cleaning, from exploring security options to increasing business-wide efficiency. In this week’s post, we’ll look at three more ways cloud technologies can contribute to an easier 2016.
Spring Cleaning Tip #4: Enhance team collaboration
The premises of work have changed tremendously over the past few years, with more employees becoming remote. To stay engaged, numerous companies have implemented collaboration platforms like IBM Connections to bring colleagues closer together. According to an Accenture study, 82% of businesses who use collaboration platforms want to increase their usage, suggesting high rates of adoption of the technology. Furthermore, with millennials becoming a vast majority of the workforce in the next few years, companies must adapt to collaboration and social technology interests.
Spring Cleaning Tip #5: Simplify and then Scale
As cloud technologies become the platform of interest for business, innovators are striving to find ways to scale up their projects without the interference of additional processes. In recent years, we’ve seen the rise of containerization, which provides the opportunity to forgo virtualization loads which can weigh down an application’s effectiveness. When integrated with applications like IBM’s BlueMix, development teams can scale new technologies with ease while automating quality assurance and testing.
Spring Cleaning Tip #6: Adjust operations costs
One of the best things about adopting cloud solutions are the associated costs. True freedom is achieved when a business is able to translate capital costs to operations costs, increasing bottom-line flexibility. Whether a company chooses to go with a public, private, or hybrid cloud setup, each offers the opportunity to choose from multiple vendors at varying costs and a high level of availability. According to RightScale, hybrid cloud is increasing in popularity with over 71% of businesses adopting the setup over the past year.
Your Turn
How about you? What is your business doing to conduct a technology Spring Cleaning this season? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below or send us a tweet.
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