In recent months, cloud strategies have taken a noticeable shift. Businesses feel it, and so do reseller partners.

With the global situation—and massive economic impact on businesses of all sizes—the new focus is on one thing: cost optimization. Digital transformation has become a matter of survival, and, with ever-tightening finances, organizations large and small are taking a critical look at their IT environments for opportunities to eliminate cost, drive efficiency and maximize every dollar spent.

This compelling event has become a leading driver to the cloud and is also driving changes within cloud environments.

Cloud adoption is on the rise, and it’s a trend that’s likely to accelerate. In the months ahead, countless businesses will re-evaluate their operations and scrutinize costs, seeking new ways to ensure their current infrastructure is fully optimized.

This presents a golden opportunity for reseller partners, who can step in as expert cloud consultants to uncover new opportunities, make recommendations and help businesses fine-tune existing solutions–whether in the cloud, on-premises or in a hybrid model.

IBM Cloud: Uniquely Positioned to Optimize Costs
As reseller partners approach a slew of new opportunities, it’s helpful to remember how IBM cloud solutions directly address the need for cost optimization. Here are three examples.

Yet financial institutions are also under constant attack by cybercriminals, who find the allure of a successful breach very high–and the potential bounty very lucrative. As such, financial companies need an airtight cyber security strategy to protect themselves from malicious actors.

With the IBM Cloud for Financial Services offering, financial institutions can deploy public cloud to optimize costs, enable innovation and deliver new, more personalized customer experiences, while managing stringent industry regulations for sensitive data and complex workloads.

IBM is the only public cloud platform with the framework in place to support regulatory workloads with automated security and industry-leading encryption services. Only the IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Crypto Services offering features keep-your-own-key (KYOK) encryption capabilities, backed by the highest level of security certification commercially available—FIPS 140-2 Level 4.

This agility also helps attract more midmarket and SMB customers—like CPA firms with many workers using large software applications on a seasonal basis (for example, tax season or end of year), and a desire to scale up and down, as needed. With IBM cloud, companies can examine their software portfolio and usage patterns, and decide when to migrate applications from the data center to the cloud for more cost efficiency during slow seasons.

Obtaining a clear picture of software assets is vital. Moving to the cloud provides an excellent opportunity to retire, replace or re-architect applications to eliminate up to 60% in software licensing costs.

By leveraging IBM infrastructure and Red Hat for database copy and file reduction, reseller partners have another solid strategy to evaluate, assess, adjust and remove duplicate files and cut extraneous costs from business.

By eliminating duplicate data—and storing the data in a hybrid cloud—users can pull down files and re-upload them whenever they want, without creating duplicate files and creating additional security exposure or compliance risk.

IBM Cloud Pak offerings through AI-infused software help you fully implement intelligent workflows to accelerate digital transformation. Supporting the effort is IBM Master Data Management Software, which provides a 360-degree view of data. It analyzes data sources and applies data quality and governance to reduce duplication. It also builds that master data into your business process and interfaces together with analytics and insights.

When Opportunity Knocks, Turn to Ingram Micro
In the months ahead, resellers will have many opportunities to evaluate and optimize their customers cloud environments to optimize costs. Fortunately, Ingram Micro makes it easy to find and address these opportunities with IBM cloud technology.

Ingram Micro offers free consultations and access to more than 65 IBM-dedicated technology experts in the United State. These experts can look at the business challenge holistically, identify the right solutions and steer reseller partners toward highly efficient, cost-optimized hybrid services to help organizations continue to innovate, drive opportunity and be ready for what’s next.

Ingram Micro makes the IBM journey attainable and fruitful—helping reseller partners “discover their path” to greater success better than any other distributor.

Ask for a consultation about IBM cloud solutions today, and enter a raffle to win one of three Lenovo ThinkVision M14 portable monitors.

Cheryl Rang is Ingram Micro’s Director of Advanced Solutions for IBM and the recent recipient of two industry awards—the 2020 CRN Women of the Channel Award and 2020 CRN 100 Rising Females in the Channel.

This guest blog is part of a Channel Futures sponsorship.