How Will Your Company Benefit From Migrating to the Cloud?

To dominate the market, companies need to deliver a seamless user experience, enable efficient operation of software solutions, provide scalable data storage, and simplify infrastructure maintenance. Optimizing expenses is also important, especially during an economic crisis. 

By moving to the cloud, it is possible to address various challenges, for instance, reduce IT costs, improve product performance, achieve scalability and high availability. With a cloud migration strategy, organizations can also improve security and facilitate remote collaboration.

Since the use of the cloud offers so many advantages, you should think about transferring to it, especially in the context of COVID-19 that has forced companies to focus on business continuity. In this article, you will learn what cloud migration is and how you can benefit from this model.

What is cloud migration? 

Migration to the cloud is the process of moving websites, applications, physical or virtual servers, databases, and entire data centers to the cloud environment. In most cases, this process describes transfer from on-premises or/and legacy infrastructure to the cloud. It is also possible to move from one cloud platform to another (cloud-to-cloud migration).

For example, a company that employs a hybrid model can transfer all elements to the cloud to achieve higher system scalability and resilience. Or an organization can decide to change a cloud service provider with the view of getting access to the required tools and features.

Top 5 advantages of cloud migration for business

1. Reduced IT costs

Cost savings are among the most essential benefits of cloud migration. Traditional vendors of internet infrastructure provide customers with computational resources, or servers, not computational power. 

While servers run 24/7, companies are charged for their continuous use, including periods when a part of computational resources is not required, for instance, during hours of low traffic. It’s worth noting that a lot of websites—that don’t have users in different time zones—have 8-12 hours of downtime per day. However, they have to pay full amount for using servers. 

Therefore, purchasing numerous servers is not a way out due to high costs. Adding one or two servers is generally insufficient to enable system scalability and fault-tolerance. At some point, a product can become unavailable due to heavy loads, or performance issues may arise. 

If you migrate to the cloud, your organization will manage to cut down operational expenses. Moving an application to the cloud, you can pay only for resources that you use, which is called the pay-as-you-go model. You can also turn to a cloud service vendor to delegate tasks such as ongoing system support, infrastructure maintenance, and resource allocation.

2. Simplified infrastructure maintenance

When a platform is difficult to maintain, software engineers have to spend a lot of time monitoring infrastructure, resolving issues, and adding new features. Errors may affect the entire product leading to poor user experience, slow page loading, or content unavailability. Extending or updating the platform is time-consuming, achieving zero downtime is quite challenging.

By implementing a cloud migration strategy, it is possible to prevent these problems. For instance, you can create a serverless architecture to delegate infrastructure maintenance and server management to a trustworthy third-party vendor such as Google, Amazon, or Microsoft.

Zero system administration is another advantage of serverless computing. At the moment, serverless is one of the main cloud computing trends.

If you aim to facilitate infrastructure maintenance, you can decompose the existing platform into microservices, loosely coupled services, each built around a certain module or feature. If some service fails, this won’t affect the whole application.

Furthermore, cloud platforms like Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure provide technologies that automatically restart failed services.   

3. High scalability

Software scalability means handling a growing amount of work by adding resources—e.g., nodes, servers—to the system. By moving apps, websites, data to the cloud, you will be able to support increased workloads and traffic much easier in comparison with on-premises infrastructure. In addition, on-premises infrastructure requires to purchase physical servers and networking equipment.

Employing the tooling provided by the cloud platform, you can enable autoscaling of resources that will manage the load according to business needs. Achieving high scalability, organizations improve performance, deliver better user experience, and minimize downtime.

“Scalability is crucial for companies aiming to ensure high availability and performance. An influx of users may lead to downtime resulting in extra expenditures. It’s a fact that just a 60-second downtime will cost Amazon more than $220,300. Undoubtedly, system scalability is one of the main cloud migration advantages.” —Sergey Glebko, Co-founder and CTO at  Arateg custom software development company.

4. Effective remote collaboration

The use of the cloud environment enables companies to access data, services, and apps from any place in the and from different devices. With cloud-based solutions like online collaboration platforms and messengers, employees can cooperate remotely, sharing files, communicating, and simultaneously working with the same documents.

What’s more, cloud computing allows organizations to enable data backup and disaster recovery, protecting resources from environmental threats.

5. Enhanced security

Through migration to the cloud, it is easier to ensure the security of sensitive data and compliance with regulations, for example, GDPR or HIPAA. Cloud platforms such as Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure provide tools for implementing multi-factor authentication and role-based access control.

For example, Azure Active Directory allows organizations to protect user credentials by enabling identity verification and enforcing conditional access policies. Amazon S3 supports server- and client-side encryption while also blocking unauthorized users.

Why do you need a cloud migration strategy? 

Take a look at what results you can achieve by implementing a cloud migration strategy:

• Analysts at IDC found that by moving from on-premises infrastructure to AWS, companies optimized infrastructure costs on average by 31%. 

• Through migration to AWS, 62% of respondents improved IT infrastructure management (IDC).

• According to Nucleus Research, institutions achieved a 69% reduction in downtime by transferring to Amazon AWS.

• Rackspace surveyed 1,300 organizations and revealed that 88% of them significantly cut down expenses while 56% of cloud users were able to increase profit.

• Experts at ZDNet found that CIOs are increasingly employing the cloud to raise flexibility and reduce pressure on corporate budgets.

As there are so many advantages of cloud migration, the use of the cloud is growing despite the coronavirus crisis.

The demand for cloud migration is growing during COVID-19 

Market Reports World forecasts that the global market size of cloud migration services is anticipated to reach $7.1 billion by 2024, progressing at a CAGR of 24% during 2021.

Gartner predicts that investment in cloud migration will rise after the COVID-19. The coronavirus pandemic triggered a worldwide economic crisis, making C-level executives and analysts work out business recovery strategies and optimize expenses. 

Today many institutions plan to invest more in IT for the purpose of transferring apps, websites, and data centers to the cloud. Experts at Gartner inform that nearly 70% of companies employing the cloud will increase spending in it after the recession caused by the coronavirus outbreak. 

According to the Deloitte 2021 TMT Predictions survey, 97% of IT managers intend to distribute workloads across two or more clouds to maximize resilience, comply with the necessary regulations, and address other issues.

“The COVID-19 pandemic forced organizations to quickly focus on three priorities: preserve cash and optimize IT costs, support and secure a remote workforce, and ensure resiliency. Investing in the cloud became a convenient means to address all three of these needs.”—Sid Nag, Vice President in the Technology and Service Provider group at Gartner

World-famous companies that use the cloud 

The Coca-Cola Company, General Electric Company, Netflix, Samsung, Twenty-First Century Fox, iRobot, Autodesk, Amazon, eBay, SoundCloud, Uber, and Thomson Reuters, successfully migrate workloads to the cloud. 

Employing the cloud, these and many other organizations managed to significantly reduce IT costs, increase business agility, improve scalability, and achieve operational resilience.

Final words

There are various advantages of cloud migration for business. This will be especially beneficial if your product is built on top of the outdated technology stack, resulting in performance issues, operational failures, and complex infrastructure maintenance.

If your platform has to process thousands or millions of requests per second while being highly scalable and resilient, it is reasonable to create a cloud-based solution. 

By moving to the cloud, you will save IT costs, establish a remote workflow, and boost efficiency. With simplified or zero infrastructure administration, software engineers will be able to focus on other tasks, which will allow you to save costs while raising employee productivity.

Thanks to the cloud, it is much easier to set up remote collaboration, which is crucial during the COVID-19 pandemic forcing people to stay at home.

If you want to migrate to the cloud or build a cloud software solution, contact Arateg software development company. They’ll get back to you within 24 hours and help address all issues. The consultation is free of charge.

The post How Will Your Company Benefit From Migrating to the Cloud? first appeared on Feedster.

from Feedster https://www.feedster.com/technology/how-will-your-company-benefit-from-migrating-to-the-cloud/