Written by – Susie Carter – Dec 2021
As a manufacturer, you understand the advantages of moving operations to the cloud—streamlined back office functions, maximized production and product development, and a stronger competitive edge. By adopting cloud technology, you can address cost considerations and leverage modern cloud infrastructure for advanced data analytics, automation and agility. This creates a more connected, cross-functional and cost-effective environment, benefiting every aspect of the manufacturing process.
Despite these clear benefits, manufacturers often face challenges convincing senior leadership to invest in replacing manual processes and legacy software with cloud platforms. Concerns about vendor lock-in and total cost of ownership can become obstacles, along with worries over contact center disruptions or the impact of public cloud solutions on data residency and migration.
Executives may recall failed IT transformation projects that resulted in high capital expenses and lacked cross-functional alignment, leading to cloud waste instead of cost optimization.
However, today’s cloud technology solutions can be tailored to your business needs, with many risks mitigated for manufacturers. Providers like AWS, GCP, Azure and others help ensure your data analytics systems operate efficiently, making it easier for cloud initiatives to deliver real value.
Read on to learn how to persuade your senior management team to invest in a cloud strategy that accelerates business growth.
Here’s what we cover:
- The challenge of convincing the leadership team
- How to build a business case
- Implementing change on a small scale
- Key performance indicators to consider
- Further roll-out of cloud technology
- Communicating results to the leadership team
- Final thoughts on moving to cloud tech
The challenge of convincing the leadership team
Traditionally, the quickest way to persuade leaders to invest is by highlighting potential financial savings. This may include discussions about how cloud migration could reduce spend or minimize costs when planned effectively. Yet, this is a risky approach for cloud transformation projects, since significant cost reductions may not materialize in the first five years.
Costs may even rise initially as you migrate systems, train employees, learn new processes and reconfigure solutions for the cloud. The long-term advantages, however, lie in global accessibility, stronger security and a seamless environment for data analytics and digital transformation.
Executives may also fear business disruption, data loss, security risks and internal resources tied up in the project. Data residency requirements, multi-cloud expansions and future cloud-native architectures can add to their concerns.
Address these issues early by positioning cloud adoption as a long-term strategy. While initial investments may temporarily increase costs, the eventual returns—through improved total cost of ownership, new revenue streams and robust analytics—justify the commitment.
Adopt a robust project planning approach and report regularly on results and insights to maximize transparency and communication. Demonstrating a clear timeline for cloud strategies and mapping them to business objectives allows leadership to see how best practices in project management reduce risk and support ongoing innovation.
How to build a business case
Developing a business case for cloud technology should focus on four main benefits: agility, efficiency, business growth and future proofing. Recognizing the positive impact of cloud infrastructure and solutions helps keep leaders and stakeholders aligned with your cloud vision.
Agility
Cloud technology enables your organization to move faster, accomplish more and outperform competitors. The flexibility of cloud service providers allows you to scale usage up or down in real time, maintaining cost-effective operations, reducing waste and reallocating resources to strategic initiatives.
Efficiency
Outsourcing data center management and routine IT maintenance—such as support, patching and configuration—to third parties saves time and money. Cloud cost optimization services help prevent payment for underutilized features, ensuring a fast return on investment.
Your IT team can save hundreds of hours annually on server configuration, focusing instead on value-added activities without increasing headcount. By reducing routine maintenance and leveraging analytics to streamline processes, your team can concentrate on advanced technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Operating on a cloud platform adds flexibility and potential, enabling your team to deliver more direct business benefits and deepen expertise with infrastructure software, while staying current in the rapidly evolving cloud computing industry.
Business growth
Free up time spent on manual, repetitive, low-value tasks to refocus on operational efficiencies, competitive differentiation and implementing new technologies such as artificial intelligence, IoT and machine learning. Cloud infrastructure provides advanced analytics capabilities, allowing you to process and interpret large volumes of information for better decision-making.
You run a manufacturing business, not a cloud computing company. Focus on your strengths while using cloud technology to operate more efficiently. Cloud strategies help you adopt the latest digital transformation advancements to streamline workflows.
For example, adopting business management software in the cloud allows you to manage supply chain and finances effectively from anywhere. This may involve multi-cloud or data cloud approaches, depending on your current environment and resources.
Providers like AWS and Microsoft build infrastructure platforms, manage databases and application platforms that let businesses deploy code and start realizing benefits immediately. Their services are part of the global cloud computing ecosystem, contributing to lower capital expenditures, consistent performance and scalable project management.
Future proofing
Traditionally, businesses purchase infrastructure as a capital expense, written off over time, which pressures decision-makers to get significant spend right—especially with concerns about vendor lock-in.
By contrast, cloud services are paid as a subscription or operating cost, offering freedom to change direction and agility beyond competitors limited by restrictive strategies. Refined cloud cost optimization keeps expenses predictable and flexible over time.
Manufacturers once had to buy enough computing power for peak usage days. With major cloud providers, you pay only for the data you use, reducing spend by matching capacity to actual needs.
Global brands automatically scale capacity to handle additional load, protecting against unplanned technology surges and allowing ongoing focus on growth opportunities without disruptions or unbalanced operations.
Implementing change on a small scale
Pilot your move to the cloud with an important but non-critical business aspect. This approach delivers early success stories and momentum while establishing team communication, issue resolution and processes. It also allows assessment of data migration feasibility for specific workloads and tests cross-functional teams’ ability to handle new procedures.
With a framework in place, you can apply experience and iterate the process across more strategic areas. Starting small helps illuminate complexities in industry-specific software that may need extra attention during cloud transition.
It’s often best to postpone migrating complicated, older products and legacy software until later, as these are more challenging to move. During this period, evaluating multi-cloud or data residency requirements will help you select the right service.
Key performance indicators to consider
AWS, one of the world’s largest cloud providers, offers free advice on best practices for designing and running cloud workloads. Guidance from other providers—including GCP and Azure—also emphasizes maximizing performance and reducing costs.
A five-point guide helps measure alignment with cloud best practices:
Operational excellence: Run and monitor systems, continually improve processes and deliver business value. Includes automating changes, responding to events and defining standards for daily operations.
- Security: Protect data, systems and security—essential for digital transformation initiatives.
- Reliability: Identify issues, adapt and resolve them to ensure systems and products perform as required.
- Performance efficiency: Use IT and computing resources efficiently, maximizing value from cloud services and aligning capacity with actual usage to prevent waste.
- Cost optimization: Control spend by understanding, analyzing and managing costs, refining project management and directing budgets toward growth objectives.
Further roll-out of cloud technology
After starting to move services and products to the cloud, focus on building momentum. Successes foster leadership support and strengthen executive buy-in.
There are six ways to move an on-premise application to the cloud, known as ‘the 6Rs’. Your choice depends on the migration journey best suited to each product:
Rehost: ‘Lift and shift’—move applications to the cloud as they are.
Re-platform: Change some components but keep products largely the same.
Re-purchase: Replace the application entirely with cloud services, such as switching from an on-premises ERP system to the same system as a cloud service.
Re-architect: Fundamentally change how the software works or replace parts of it, possibly adopting cloud-native design or cross-functional integration.
Retain: Keep a product as is if it’s too complex to move or offers no significant time or agility savings.
Retire: Decommission an on-premises product and transfer its functionality to a different cloud-based system.
Communicating results to the leadership team
Once you’ve migrated products and services and achieved early wins, you’ll be ready to share results and metrics with leadership. Concrete data, such as reduced cloud costs or enhanced analytics capabilities, demonstrates real progress in your cloud journey.
Metrics could include cost to serve each customer or cost per sale on your website. Showing how analytics or cloud strategies have improved operational effectiveness is a powerful motivator for further investment.
With real data, you can initiate informed conversations about future improvements. Highlight how multi-cloud and vendor lock-in concerns were addressed, or how contact center functionality improved through new cloud solutions.
Final thoughts on moving to cloud tech
Securing C-suite buy-in for cloud migration is essential—not just as a tech upgrade, but as a driver of business growth and profit. Demonstrating how cloud investments yield better cost ownership, expanded analytics and a resilient global structure builds confidence and maintains executive support.
Communicate project goals clearly to all levels within your organization and foster a culture where teams embrace agile ways of working to realize opportunities and rewards. Effective project management keeps costs predictable while enabling digital transformation.
With teams aligned, your manufacturing business can focus on value-added activities and reach its full potential. Managed well, cloud infrastructure brings better alignment, improved data residency control and the ideal environment for artificial intelligence enhancements.
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