Why Should You Migrate Your Business to the Cloud?

Last updated on July 19th, 2023 at 06:43 am

Cloud computing remains one of the most talked-about topics in the realm of business optimization. It has garnered much attention from businesses because of the dire necessity of reform from legacy infrastructures.

Although legacy infrastructures such as the on-premises hardware servers can function, modern cloud computing is taking strides in its progress and leaving the traditional basis of computing far behind.

The rate of progress can easily be fathomed when reviewing the projections made; according to research, the cloud migration services market is projected to grow at a whopping 24.5% compound annual growth rate.

This means that it can be expected to rise from USD 3.2 billion in 2017 to 9.5 million by the next year, 2022. This alone indicates the rise in demand for cloud computing, which arises due to the merits of cloud services.

What is Cloud Migration?

Cloud migration is the act of shifting one’s digital operations to the cloud, which can easily be visualized by imagining a smaller office moving into a bigger one. We must load up every datasheet, files, attendance records, and other office paraphernalia to a truck and move it to another physical space, which is more accommodating. Only, in cloud migration, it mostly isn’t physical.

What are the different cloud service models?

A cloud service model is simply the kind of service provided to you by a cloud vendor, whether it is providing software, platform, or infrastructure. Although a fourth model called FaaS (Function as a service) is becoming more popular, the three conventional service models are:

1. Software as a Service (SaaS): It is a provision of software, but not as a bought product, rather as a service. It is like renting a fully-furnished condo, in which you only have to move and live. It remains someone else’s property, but you can live in it like it’s your own. These are available via cloud vendors over the internet and are surprisingly common.

2. Platform as a Service (PaaS): It refers to vendors offering a platform as a service. The platform facilitates application development by providing the client with all the tools needed. It can be compared to renting an unfurnished house, where you get more freedom to choose the furnishing of your condo.

3. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): It refers to renting servers and storage from a cloud provider, which acts as the infrastructure needed to build one’s application. It’s very similar to leasing a plot of land and building one’s own house – given that the tools and materials needed to do that are provided by the landowner.

The biggest hurdle in cloud migration is finding the right people to help you with it. You must do thorough research to find a trustworthy platform or agency that has Managed IT Services in the past and have a fair bit of experience in the field. Such agencies will make your migration easy and hassle-free.

What are the benefits of cloud computing?

For any business, one of the most crucial elements which determine its success is its capital. Cloud computing drastically lowers IT infrastructure costs. Instead of working with predicted utilization of computing resources.

Businesses can simply adjust their computing resources on the fly. This is one of the most beneficial elements of cloud computing: elasticity. This elasticity eliminates the need to buy unnecessary hardware and other assets related to on-premises servers.

This elasticity also increases business agility greatly. With on-premises services, businesses need to order hardware in advance and wait weeks to be delivered to improve their capacity.

Instead, cloud computing offers much better, faster IT services; businesses do not have to wait for weeks and can simply lease capabilities much more quickly and efficiently from cloud providers.

Another important facet of cloud computing is its security. Since cloud providers regularly upgrade their services, matching the latest industry standard and complying with the newest regulations, the possibility of cyber-attacks is greatly reduced. Gartner’s predictions reassure this. According to them, by 2025, 99% of cloud security failures will be due to customer’s mistakes.

One of the greatest problems with on-premises hardware is its unreliability and downtime. It can be minimized, but it becomes harder if a company has more than one data center. If the primary data center experiences any problems, the company has outages. Most cloud vendors assure 99% uptime, and they even guarantee it in their service-level agreements.

Moreover, cloud computing also provides better performance, which leads to coherence within a company and better customer satisfaction. Hosting their application or website in cloud data centers means that the data does not have to travel a lesser distance to reach the users, which reduces latency. Additionally, data center asset recovery with DataKnox offers businesses a reliable and environmentally responsible solution for retiring and recycling outdated hardware, ensuring efficient resource utilization while minimizing electronic waste, and contributing to a more sustainable IT infrastructure.

Lastly, cloud computing is extremely flexible. Cloud servers can facilitate both customers and employees. The cloud service is accessible to everyone from everywhere. This makes it easier for a business to expand its reach to newer demographics, whether international or national while letting its employees work flexibly. Furthermore, there are different types of cloud deployments, which allows all companies a better and more flexible approach to workload placement and ROI.

Conclusion

While it is true that cloud migration is a hefty ordeal and requires a lot of time and dedication, which many companies are unwilling to lend, it must be noted that it leads to greater and faster progress.

Gartner outlines five approaches to this process, which are commonly known as the 5 R’s: Rehost, Refactor, Revise, Rebuild, Replace. Cloud providers are also known to help businesses throughout the migration process.

Cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services offer tools like Migration Evaluator, Cloud Adoption Readiness Tool (CART), AWS Migration Hub, etc., to help businesses through this difficult process.

Cloud computing is continuously going on to become a need of the hour. There is a huge difference between the businesses that have adapted themselves to cloud computing and those that haven’t. The gap between the performance of on-premises servers and cloud servers is visibly widening. This is the perfect time for businesses to switch to the cloud.