One way to do this is to take advantage of the benefits provided by cloud computing. One benefit is reducing cost. Perhaps more importantly, realising new opportunities for optimising your business processes. With this in mind, we thought we would compile our own list of the top reasons for moving your business to the cloud.
1. Shift from Capital to Operational Expense
Large upfront capital expenditure is a common requirement with on-premise IT infrastructure. With the cloud, you move into a predictable ‘pay for what you use’ utility-based monthly expense. The difference between traditional and cloud infrastructure is that there are no longer upfront purchases of server hardware and software.
2. Integrate Applications and Break Down Data Silos
Cloud-based applications are designed to integrate with each other through published APIs. This integration between different cloud applications offers new opportunities to streamline your business processes, remove the need for manual data re-entry, and eliminate data silos.
3. Achieve Cost Savings Through Economies of Scale
There are many reasons why the cloud is often cheaper.1 The most obvious of them is that the large cloud providers are able to benefit from huge economies of scale. The scale means they can offer more computing power at a lower cost to you. Other savings come from paying only for what you use and having the ability to scale resources up or down as required.
4. Scale On-Demand with Ease
One of the biggest challenges with traditional infrastructure is capacity planning. How organisations plan to cope with peaks and troughs of demand, and how to meet future growth. It's often a guessing game with serious ramifications when not correct. Aside from the cost, there are often technical limitations or challenges to easily scale systems without interruption with traditional infrastructure. The cloud simplifies this.by allowing you to scale resources up or down on-demand, without the technical limitations or interruptions of physical hardware.
5. Enable Hybrid & Remote Work
In a modern organisation, employees need to access company data from a variety of devices and locations. Cloud services make this flexibility seamless, providing a better and more secure experience for your mobile and remote workforce.
6. Rapid Deployment and Speed to Market
With traditional systems, the time taken to commission and configure services is generally measured in weeks or months. With cloud-delivered services, a company can get new environments and applications up and running in a matter of hours, dramatically accelerating your time-to-market.
7. Giving the Control Back to the Users
No longer is the IT department solely driving decision making. One of the most significant changes in business is the ‘Bring your own device’ model. Decision making on tools and access are moving back towards user and business needs first.
8. Data-driven Intelligence
With cloud-based applications and services, it is far easier than ever to pull together different strands of data. This includes bringing together multiple sources, performing advanced analytics, and reporting. All in real-time.
9. Easier System Upgrades and Patches with Fewer Hassles
Maintaining up to date software is one of the biggest headaches faced by the IT department. With cloud systems, ongoing upgrades are performed automatically as part of the normal service delivery. Upgrades are done on a regular basis behind the scenes with little or no interruption.
10. Enterprise-Grade Security
When cloud computing first started, one of the biggest areas of concern was security. After some time, people are now starting to realise that this fear was misguided. Hyperscale cloud providers offer a level of security, compliance, and physical data centre protection that would be cost-prohibitive for most organisations to achieve on their own.2 As well as configurations that support the security standards needed by medical or financial organisations, and more.
In Summary
Embracing the cloud offers significant opportunities for business growth. It frees your team from the low-value work of managing and deploying physical servers, allowing them to focus on high-value activities and innovations that drive your business forward.
Your Next Step: From Strategy to Action
Understanding these benefits is the first step. The next is building a clear strategy to achieve them. Whether you need help defining your Cloud Strategy, executing a seamless Cloud Migration, or ensuring your environment is optimised with ongoing Managed Services, our team is here to help.
