Not long ago, the idea of enterprises putting their mission-critical data and applications in “the cloud”—someone else’s servers, in someone else’s data center!—seemed preposterous.
At least, it seemed preposterous to the corporate leaders. Of course, the IT teams saw the advantages of cloud migration early on, but questions about stability, security, and costs made it a tough sell.
What a difference a few years makes. Cloud computing is no longer something only IT nerds get excited about. Corporate leaders now have a keen interest in moving their IT environments to cloud services. Some of the motivation has more to do with appearances than technology; company leaders don’t want to appear behind the times relative to their competitors. But a growing impetus towards cloud migration is driven by cloud computing’s technological and fiscal advantages.
Some large companies still have not moved to the cloud or have done so only for small proof-of-concept projects. For those organizations, the C-suite might need a bit more convincing. This article discusses some of the main cloud-migration points corporate leadership should be aware of today.
Technological Benefits of a Cloud Migration
The technology benefits realized by housing data and applications on cloud-based resources are more numerous than ever. Some of the advantages over on-premise hosting include:
- Easy scalability: When applications need more data storage, computing power, or bandwidth, you can accomplish it with a few mouse clicks. In some cases, you can do it automatically. This capability is a major advantage over the weeks-long process of acquiring, installing, configuring, and troubleshooting additional physical hardware in an on-premise data center.
- Robust architecture: In an on-premise IT environment, preventing disruptions to applications and services caused by server failures requires complex, expensive server architectures, such as clustering and mirroring. In a cloud environment, “high availability” is set up much more easily. Moreover, cloud backup servers need not be located in the same physical data center—they can be on different continents, further guarding against server and facility failures.
- Business continuity and disaster recovery: Hosting your IT environment in the cloud simplifies a major piece of your business continuity and disaster recovery planning. Restoring an on-premise data center can take months and cost millions of dollars. When it’s someone else’s data center, and that someone has multiple data centers worldwide, your risk is much lower.
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Cloud Migration Fiscal Advantages
C-suite denizens pay particular attention to things that affect costs and revenues, and the fiscal advantages of cloud migration are quite compelling:
- Decreased hardware costs: Server hardware costs money to purchase, set up, and maintain. It depreciates rapidly and has to be replaced every so often. Furthermore, the facility costs to keep the servers powered on and cooled can be staggering. With cloud migration, these costs are all but eliminated.
- Operational cost efficiency: With physical servers, you pay to run and maintain them whether they are used 100% of the time or 1% of the time. In the cloud, you pay only for the resources that are actually used, which is much more efficient.
- Reduced labour costs: An on-premise data center requires technicians and facilities personnel to operate and maintain. When you reduce your on-premise IT footprint, you can allocate those resources to more productive activities in the organization.
Security Improvements with a Cloud Migration
At one time, company leaders were not comfortable housing their data outside the “four walls” of their data centers. They worried that housing their data on someone else’s servers represented a high-security risk. The truth is that with a strong encryption of the data, both in storage and in transit, data can be just as secure in the cloud as it is in your own data center, if not more so.
With cloud migration, data security is still your responsibility, but it’s easier to implement and maintain and easier to recover in the event of a cyberattack. This Gartner article looks at the evolving infrastructure threat landscape and outlines recommended tactics and techniques to improve security.
For example, a ransomware attack in your data center can disable your file servers, databases, and application servers; it might cost a fortune and take weeks to recover. With cloud migration and with proper system backups (which are also much easier in the cloud), compromised systems are deleted, and the backups are restored in a matter of minutes. And with a high-availability arrangement, your end-users and customers might never know there was a problem.
Bottom Line
Cloud migration has become a central component of digital transformation for many enterprises. Although you may never completely eliminate an on-premise IT footprint, companies can still realize significant cost savings by moving a majority of their data and applications to the cloud.
Those savings and the other advantages of cloud migration make it the obvious choice even for the most technically challenged corporate leaders.
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