Why Businesses Should Consider Moving to the Cloud

Highlights:

• Dealing with ransomware can be one of the most expensive problems for any business and moving to the cloud can eliminate the security problem.
• Moving to a cloud solution can help remove tedious day-to-day tasks from an organization’s IT team.

The COVID-19 pandemic was a bump in the road for businesses of all sizes, forcing them to rethink their decisions. With remote work becoming the norm, firms scrambled to support a remote workforce and disparate operations with their old on-premises systems. Things haven’t changed much in two years as they still navigate new business ways. Though the realization to move to the cloud has been all-encompassing now.

The cloud truly offers a level-playing field, providing companies with flexible, scalable, and cost-effective computing power in the cloud. There are many reasons to move to the cloud – It reduces IT costs, accelerates innovation, improves service quality, and much more. There are many compelling reasons to embark on a cloud migration journey.

In this blog, we highlight some of the top reasons why we see organizations migrate to a cloud platform:

Security:

Security has always been and will continue to be the prime concern for organizations. Cloud migration allows enterprises to modernize their IT infrastructure using best practices and, thus, secure applications from malicious hacking attempts.

It’s a common belief that the cloud alone is sufficient to keep the organizations secure. The cloud enables groups to execute security policies, governance, and compliance guardrails needed for operational purposes.

Moving systems to the cloud eliminate complications of a ransomware attack. All data in the cloud is encrypted in transit, at rest, and in backups. The cloud provides much more robust security than traditional data centers as it stores business information and data centrally.

Capital expense reduction:

Moving to the cloud provides an easy way to archive data without investing in an on-premises infrastructure. Businesses must be in a fix as they have already invested in setting up a data center complete with servers, hardware, racks, power, cooling, battery backup, and VPN software. Questions may pop as to why they should move to the cloud now.

The answer is simple: All these infrastructures require maintenance, and the maintenance cost rises yearly. Moving to the cloud can eliminate such capital costs, allowing businesses to instead invest in being more proactive and secure. Many organizations are moving infrequently accessed data (archive data) to the cloud to meet compliance regulations.

Operational cost reduction:

Besides reducing capital costs, moving to the cloud also helps to reduce operational costs. Operational costs include hardware and software upgradation, administering systems, managing patches, and performance.

Cloud ERP and related applications are subscription-based and do not need data centers. Since upgrades are automatic, users always operate on upgraded versions, and payments for upgrades must be made every couple of years.

Easy scalability:

Cloud is the best place for businesses to get started or witness a steady growth trajectory. Moving to the cloud provides organizations the flexible option to scale users, storage space, and volume of transactions. This helps save on costs as businesses must pay only for what they use, unlike on-premises solutions that need redundant hardware, incurring additional maintenance, and expenses. The cloud makes it easy to expand or reduce processing when other infrastructure resources are readily available. This helps minimize the burden of predicting and planning for peak demand on your system.

Unburdening internal IT:

Moving to a cloud solution can help remove tedious day-to-day tasks for the IT team. Eliminating time-consuming tasks frees the staff to work on strategic projects that can have a more significant positive impact on the organization. Moving to the cloud ensures that the IT staff is not bogged down by swapping power supplies and fixing cables, thus freeing them to participate in more impactful work. Empowering the internal IT team with a cloud solution can increase employee satisfaction and help avoid the headache of finding, hiring, and retaining top-level talent.

Minimize end-of-life complications:

A crucial consideration for many organizations to move to the cloud is to gauge end-of-life timelines for critical hardware and software. Many organizations don’t want to deal with rigid licensing agreements and long-term contracts anymore, making it imperative for them to move to the cloud. Moving to the cloud ensures that organizations can be unburdened of concerns regarding application life cycles or contract terms. They can pay as they go for crucial cloud capabilities and take advantage of updates as they come available. They can immediately gain access to the latest technologies without signing inflexible, long-term contracts.

Consolidate data centers:

Companies no longer must run their own on-premises data centers, thanks to the potential of cloud computing. IT managers can delegate backend tasks to independent cloud service providers and reallocate personnel to higher-value tasks. In order to increase corporate efficiency, organizations can also combine operations and provide access to cloud services as needed.

Cost-efficient and stable data storage:

The cloud makes it accessible to archive data without additional investment in on-premises infrastructure.

In a bid to comply with regulations, organizations are moving infrequently accessed data (archive data) to the cloud. Traditionally, tape storage was considered the best option to store data offsite. Still, there were a lot of issues, including managing tape rotations, constantly changing technology, and deterioration of tapes in storage.

Such gaps made way for the introduction of cloud-based storage options. Cloud technology and the benefits of cloud computing may look exciting, but it’s essential to put forth some questions such as:

• Does your backup software integrate with cloud storage?
• How much data needs to be moved to the cloud? Can your internet connections support moving that much data?
• Do you have retention policies for how long data should exist in the cloud before being deleted?
• If you need all that data back from the cloud, how do you get it back quickly?

Conclusion

In a fast-paced IT world, the cloud helps keep competition at bay. Moving to the cloud doesn’t need to be complicated, but the benefits can be enjoyed only via careful migration. No organization can ignore the benefits of reduced costs and complexity, flexible scalability, and lower per-unit cost that the cloud offers.

The belief that data must be on-site to be secure is as misguided as the belief that money is safer where it can be seen. A reliable cloud IT service provider can invest far more into their security than businesses trying to run it on their own technology.