We’ve all heard of cloud computing and it’s rare now to find a business who doesn’t have at least some footprint in it. COVID-19 has enhanced the need for cloud – enabling businesses to access and share data quickly and adapt to increasing scalability, depending on demand.
We are cloud specialists and we’ve worked with clients to transition their workloads to cloud and re-engineer their legacy apps to modern cloud native architectures. Our experience has shown us that the top four benefits to migrating to cloud are:
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Increased agility
Increased business agility has become the top reason enterprises have migrated to the cloud in recent years. By providing a more central storage area of enterprise data in one place, management can make more informed decisions and be able to rapidly adapt to rectify risk. This will lead to the business moving faster and saving money on managing change and provide more insights to consumers of that data.
Customers, partners and internal stakeholders can access the data they need quickly and with ease – everything is there at the click of a button. Communication within the business is also improved, which leads to higher productivity and job satisfaction. A data driven architecture is proving much more popular in the more recent digital age, rather than an application driven architecture, where Cloud hosted data platforms fit more seamlessly into achieving this goal.
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Reduced costs
Cloud computing provides excellent financial benefits such as budget savings and increased workplace productivity. Costs are kept low due to being a pay and go style system, only spending on the services you use. Let’s look at two key areas:
Hardware costs – the need for installing network hardware is gone. Instead, of using in-house equipment, servers are rented from cloud providers such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, or Oracle. These off-site servers mean a significant decrease is money spent on hardware equipment can be achieved, if handled in the right way. Additionally, office space is freed up and costs are easier to manage and minimise around electricity usage.
Labour costs – with servers being external, there’s less need for a big IT department to keep up with hosting all applications and data. Businesses have realised this and cut down to smaller IT teams, to have more time to devote to driving business benefit through service and operational enablement.
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Improved resilience
Resiliency of the cloud means it can rebuild itself or readapt, after an event which might affect its infrastructure, or in the event of a “crisis situation”. It also applies to restoring data back to the desired state.
Depending on the level of resilience required, a Cloud solution can easily be provided with resilience at the first level, by creating a duplicate Disaster Recover instance of that solution or service. This can then remain idle (not charged in terms of pay as you go fees) until required, where, for example, the Cloud Region becomes unavailable and needs to switch to a stable Region.
Other higher levels of resilience can be set up but there is a trade off around cost for more active-type configurations, that require transaction level data to also be maintained.
Cloud also offers more flexibility and freedom compared to hosting on a local server, which might worry some enterprise owners. Could we be hacked? Security on the cloud is stronger than on local servers. Cloud hosts, unlike internal IT staff, monitor the security of the systems for you – full time. RapidScale have proven this and report that 94% of businesses saw an improvement in security after switching to the cloud.
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Increased scalability
Scalability is a key driver in the uptake of cloud with enterprises. IT resources can be increased or decreased depending on the demand for them. Processing power, data storage and networking can be scaled up quickly. This is due to the third-party provider having the cloud infrastructure already in place. Unlike years ago, when it could take weeks or months to scale with on-site, physical hardware. Also, using deployment SaaS solutions for deployment capabilities such as Kubernetes, these can be more easily implemented in Cloud Infrastructures. This can then enable more flexible and more scalable Data Lake, Applications or API solutions via Virtual Machines or Containers, which can be scaled up or down on demand.
We are certified developers and administrators in Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services and Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It’s our job to help you prepare and implement a cloud strategy, then run and manage your cloud services, and complement this with providing expertise regarding your Digital or API maturity journey.
We have worked with the likes of Deutsche Bank, ICBC and Standard Bank Jersey, many NHS Trusts/Boards, Affinity Water, Carpetright, and Robert Walters to reduce costs and drive revenue.
Find out more about our cloud expertise here. If you’d like a chat about how we can help you, please get in touch.