23 / 04 / 2024
Websites and ecommerce solutions have been in the cloud for a long time. But nowadays more and more companies and organizations are also choosing to bring their infrastructure (IaaS) and applications (SaaS) to the cloud. Even many business-critical applications are already running in a public or hybrid cloud today. Not illogical when you consider the benefits this can offer. In this blog post, we look at the top reasons for migrating to the public cloud.
A migration to the cloud means a cost shift from Capital Expense (CAPEX) to Operational Expense (OPEX). You no longer pay for hardware that must be written off, but you enter a pay-per-use model for services that you purchase from a cloud service provider such as Microsoft, Amazon or Google. An additional advantage is that you have a clear overview of your costs at all times and can adjust immediately – read: upscale or downscale - if necessary. Your investments will therefore be much more tailored to your business needs. When you make the financial comparison between the cloud and your own infrastructure, you must make sure to take the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of your IT infrastructure into account. Buying and writing off a server may at first sight seem cheaper than migrating to the cloud, but that is because chances are you forget a number of costs (management, security, electricity, downtime, etc.).
An important advantage of the cloud is that you can upscale or downscale quickly and easily. Adding or removing users, computing power, memory, storage capacity can be done with a few clicks - or even automated - and requires no downtime. That means that you no longer have to consider whether your infrastructure is too large or too small. In the cloud you always have infrastructure tailored to your needs at any time. You can start small and grow quickly if necessary. You can easily add extra servers as your project grows. Or vice versa. If you need more users or capacity during a certain period of the year or at certain peak times, you can use more capacity and then reduce your infrastructure or number of users without any problems. An additional advantage is that your costs are scaled in the same way. You pay more if you use more and you pay less if your environment or the number of users becomes smaller.
When certain online services or applications are not available, your organization most likely loses a lot of money. When it comes to internal services, it often means that employees cannot be productive, when it comes to services for customers, it means loss of income or damage for your company brand. In the cloud you have better guarantees regarding availability and uptime. The moment something goes wrong on a server, the work is seamlessly taken over by another server in your cloud environment. Maintenance is also carried out in this way without downtime.
It may sound contradictory, but the cloud is currently more secure than servers that are managed on-premise (at your company). Why? Because cloud providers are intensively working on security and privacy, security is provided in several layers and the (high) costs for this can be spread over several customers. An ISO 27001 certificate for data security offers you the guarantee that a cloud provider takes security very seriously. Compare it with a bank vault. You know that a safe at a bank is safer than a safe in your own office. Because a bank can and must take more security measures than you. Does that mean that the cloud is 100% secure? No. You can also break into a bank, but it takes a lot more effort than breaking into your office.
Business continuity has become a crucial element today. Every company or organisation depends to a greater or lesser extent on IT. Downtime, the unavailability of applications or the loss of data is no longer an option. Backups and disaster recovery are no longer nice-to-have options, but simply necessary. There too, the cloud offers many possibilities. A high-quality cloud backup is simple, cost-efficient and fast. You choose how often backups are made and how long they must be kept in the cloud. Regarding disaster recovery (restoring your servers and data after an incident) the cloud also has a big advantage: a very short time to recovery. You can get back to work more quickly.
In times of global warming, the cloud is also a sustainable solution thanks to consolidation and virtualization. Less hardware is required compared to individual servers that companies now use. The result is less industrial production, less transport, etc. Electricity is the biggest challenge in terms of sustainability. But cloud providers now work with servers that achieve a current performance of more than 90%. Together with an ideal occupancy rate, the electricity and environmental costs per million operations are thereby considerably reduced. Add to that the choice for green energy and you will get the most sustainable approach to IT.
This blog post is part of a series on migrating to Azure. Make sure to read the other blogs in the series.
