Benefits of Migrating to Cloud

Migrating increases IT efficiency and reduces IT costs, but there are some challenges to consider, such as planning and costs. Read on to find out how migration benefits and challenges are addressed.

Benefits of migrating to cloud

Cost Optimisation

Cloud computing is an efficient and cost-effective way to reduce operational costs while improving IT processes. By moving to the cloud, you provide your company with the benefit of only paying for what you need and do not have to maintain costly data-centers when your important information is stored in the cloud.

• • Pay as you use – The pay-as-you-go model allows you to pay only for the services you use, drastically reducing costs, and customising your setup based on your usage.
  • Reduce Carbon Footprint– Reduce your energy costs in terms of electricity and cooling by outsourcing them to a cloud provider that offers a more energy-efficient infrastructure.
  • IT Operations – Reduce the need for expensive IT technicians to manage and maintain hardware.
  • Reduce Office Footprint – Reducing real estate costs and encouraging more decentralized offices.

Flexibility & Scalability

With cloud computing, your company can scale up and down based on its IT needs and business plan. It is difficult for companies to adapt to changing customer demands when IT solutions that are ideal for one year become obsolete a few years later. With cloud migration, organizations can reshape their infrastructure and workloads to better meet today’s needs without being confined by outdated equipment and assets.

• • Automate Scaling – As demand spikes or if the organization needs more powerful compute resources, the organization can instantly alter its resource allocation.
  • Change Ready – Change Ready – As applications and usage evolve, infrastructure can also evolve quickly without requiring major changes.
  • Support Hybrid-Cloud – Utilize both public and private clouds to maximize resource efficiency.
  • Support Global Presence – Organizations can improve performance by running workloads close to where their users and customers are located by using cloud platforms that maintain a global presence.

Improved Security

Almost all public clouds have built-in security features as well as specialised cloud security tools to help ensure that an organization’s resources are protected. In many cases, security patches are applied automatically by the cloud provider.

• • Shared Responsibility – The cloud consists of systems, networks, and applications that must be configured and maintained securely according to the “shared responsibility” model. The “shared responsibility” model requires you to create and maintain a secure cloud environment for your users.
  • Stronger Security – Cloud computing offers much stronger security than traditional data centers because it stores your business information centrally. In addition to security analytics and periodic updates, most popular cloud providers also provide cross-enterprise visibility.
  • Automatic Updates – Most cloud providers keep their network and resources secure by performing periodic tests and patching vulnerabilities as soon as they are detected.

Compliances

In highly regulated industries like finance, healthcare, and government, some cloud platforms have specialized offerings to seamlessly meet compliance standards.

• • Certification – Additionally, many cloud providers hold compliance certifications such as ISO27001, PCI-DSS, AICPA/SOC, and HIPAA, which means that if your organization has specific compliance requirements or concerns, you can rest easy knowing that your data is protected.

Backup & Recovery from Failures

Most cloud providers offer built-in, one-click backup and recovery capabilities, as well as the ability to store backups in different geographical locations.

• • Business Continuity – Most providers provide robust DR (Disaster Recovery) and business continuity features, with data stored in multiple data centers and geographical regions.
  • Backup & Recovery – Support remote and multi-regional backups, ensuring easy recovery in case of faults or disasters.
  • High Availability – There are many reasons to use a high availability cluster. If one server fails, the other servers will take over the workload.

Easy monitoring and management

The cloud provider’s management tool can help organisations manage and monitor their on-premises and cloud resources from one place.

• • Central Management Tools – Cloud providers often provide a centralized management tool for managing and monitoring on-premises and cloud infrastructure.
  • Manage Resources – Infrastructure resources can be easily provisioned and managed with tools such as Terraform, native CLI tools, etc. Provide infrastructure as a service.
  • Monitoring – Centralized logging and monitoring can help operational services by providing information on hotspots and potential issues.

Challenges to migration

There are a variety of challenges associated with cloud migration. If properly planned and contingencies are in place, the migration can be a smooth one.

• • Cost – The cost of doing a lift-and-shift may be higher because of legacy applications, but if you make small changes to services that are more expensive than cloud native/friendly services, the cost should reduce in the medium to long term. Using the tools provided by providers is highly recommended for monitoring resources usage and costs..

• • Security & Privacy – Considering network security and potential vulnerabilities before beginning the migration process is critical when migrating data from physical servers to the cloud.
    • • Can the cloud migration process cause short-term vulnerabilities?
    • • Are systems monitored in real time for threats?
    • • Does the data have end-to-end encryption and is it backed up?
    • • Is the cloud platform’s security policy aligned with yours?
    • • Does it comply with data security compliance standards (HIPAA, PCI DSS, CCPA, etc.)?

• • Downtime – The biggest risk when moving large amounts of data to the cloud is network outages. If your data isn’t properly backed up, interruptions can cause irrecoverable data loss. The workaround might be creating a backup IT environment that will serve as a temporary server until the migration has been completed. Temporary servers are often unable to handle peak loads from users.