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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.
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:
Your Cloud Security Journey: 4 Ways to Protect Your Business
C-suite denizens pay particular attention to things that affect costs and revenues, and the fiscal advantages of cloud migration are quite compelling:
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.
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.