There are multitude of reasons many companies are migrating to the cloud. Some are migrating to the cloud to aid in increasing the productivity of their IT staff, as well as the overall workforce. Others are looking to scale down data centers, help to lessen infrastructure sprawl, and modernize legacy applications.
Additionally, some organizations are re-thinking their missions by upgrading to cloud technologies that drive acceleration of their digital transformation. This modernization uncovers cost reduction opportunities and promotes growth opportunities. The demand for cloud IT is driven by mandates to lower IT costs, meet greater customer expectations, and gain faster data insights. Although cloud is just a part of digital transformation, it’s a rapidly growing part that decision-makers can’t afford to ignore.
Understanding why your organization is adopting cloud solutions is a crucial step to attaining the desired results. More often than not, organizations don’t have this step clearly defined and fail on their first attempt at a successful migration. It’s also important to note that while your organization may want to deploy a cloud first initiative, it is almost always best to start gradually with a hybrid-cloud approach. While every organization is different, and will have their own reasons for moving to the cloud, there are some common drivers:
Cost Avoidance
Estimating hardware refresh and maintenance programs are the principal contributors to cost avoidance. More often, organizations are looking to mitigate or eliminate the cost and effort required to execute an extensive refresh cycles
Reduced Operational Costs
In addition to eliminating capital expenditures, cloud deployments also help reduce operational costs by automating tactical activities. Currently, organizations spend the majority of their budgets on operations and maintenance and not on activities directed on innovation. Cloud deployments help organizations to reduce the time normally spent on repetitive tasks, that aren’t allowing IT resources to shift their activities to greater value added deliverables, such as implementing new technologies.
Cloud deployments also help to improve efficiency of an organization by helping to remove unnecessary steps to streamline processes. This process aids in increasing productivity an organization by allowing IT personnel to shift focus onto projects that help to support business growth.
Increased Workforce Agility
Enabling your organizations IT to be more agile, or aiding IT to be more responsive to business needs and react faster to market changes. End users no longer have to wait for IT infrastructure to be ready, as hardware is no longer purchased, provisioned, and patched through lengthy procurement processes. IT organizations have access to a breadth of cloud portfolio offerings in an on-demand format that can be provisioned as needed, without needing to build data centers or maintaining hardware.
With the introduction of SaaS technologies into your hybrid-cloud environment, it means that your organizations IT no longer have to be consumed with traditional application management tasks. However, it is just as important to note that a cloud environment does require a new set of IT skills to manage, deploy, and navigate these new resources.
Greater Operational Resiliency
By using cloud environments to support an organization’s Disaster Recovery plan, an organization can immediately reduce its risk profile and risk mitigation costs. Data backup hosted on cloud resources also reduces costs over traditional tape backup as well as time associated with restoration of critical data. Cloud computing resources are hosted in multiple geographic locations and cloud providers footprints are growing exponentially, providing greater assurance on the availability of your data. There is also a greater assurance that your data will be more secure, as cloud providers have built their businesses around these competencies.
Cloud providers are also striving to cover many compliance standards, and are usually held to a higher standard, ensuring that your data is as secure, if not more so, than if it were contained on-premises by an organization. With that said, there is typically a shared security model that requires you ensure your cloud environment adheres to compliance guidance, implementing the tools provided.
So when should your company migrate to the cloud?
Short answer is when you have a business use case that dictates the move. Before you begin any cloud initiative, ensure that you have identified which of the business drivers is behind your decision to migrate to the cloud.
Once you have identified one or more of the drivers, you will need to prioritize these drivers against all business use cases, as part of your overall cloud migration strategy.
Create a Cloud Migration Roadmap, and adhere to it. This will ensure that you have the best chance for success with your cloud migration strategy.
Author Bio: George Chanady is a Sr. Solutions Architect for CCSI. Experienced Senior Solutions Architect with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology and services industry. Strong Technical professional skilled in Storage Area Network (SAN), Domain Name System (DNS), Data Center, BladeCenter, and Cloud Applications. Currently held certifications include MCSA and AWS Certified Solutions Architect.
