As technology has moved forward, more and more organisations have looked towards the cloud as the future of their business. After all, the cloud’s many benefits speak for themselves — and organisations are here to listen.
However, when considering cloud migration, ensuring that integral parts of your business remain functional and successful after making the switch is vital — as your business shouldn’t come to a standstill for the sake of IT upgrades. Business continuity is vital – ensuring that your organisation continues to function in the face of disruption and even disaster.
In this article, we’re going to go over the benefits of cloud migration, and how you can make considerations to ensure that cloud migration goes smoothly as well as how you can utilise the cloud to ensure business continuity.
Key Benefits of Migrating to the Cloud
Migrating to the cloud is becoming a more and more tantalising offer for any business. With the sheer number of benefits of looking towards the cloud, at least considering it for your business is becoming more of a no-brainer —
- Cost-Efficiency: Migrating to the cloud is much more cost-efficient than on-premise infrastructure. This is due to a few different reasons, such as reducing capital expenditure and hardware costs, and the flexibility of pay-as-you-go pricing.
- Scalability: Cloud integrations are scalable with ease. Where scaling up on-premise systems will require investing in new hardware and implementing it into your existing system, cloud scaling is simply changing a setting on a control panel to meet your needs.
- Flexibility: The sheer flexibility of cloud computing means that it accommodates multiple segments of your organisation with ease, meaning that it can meet your needs — all with ease of integration.
- Accessibility: The cloud makes it easy to be able to access files wherever you are, due to the always-accessible nature of documents stored in the cloud — no matter where you are and what device you’re utilising.
- Security: On-prem hardware is breachable physically and needs to be securely maintained, whereas cloud hardware is impossible to breach due to the nature of how the cloud works.
- Performance: When considering on-prem hardware, greater performance means higher investment in better hardware, whereas cloud computing is high-performance and scalable to meet your needs.
These are simply some of the multitude of benefits that cloud computing can bring to your organisation — and can help unlock new heights of success throughout your business.
How the Cloud Ensures Business Continuity
Business continuity is the process of ensuring that your organisation stays operational in the event of an emergency or disaster. Due to the aforementioned benefits, business continuity and the cloud go hand in hand to ensure that your business remains successful in the long term.
- Availability and Redundancy: Cloud providers provide their services in a multitude of regions, and operate their data centers in just as many. This means that, in the event of a catastrophe at one data centre, there are tons of data centres close by to take the load and minimise downtime.
- Data Recovery: Cloud service providers let you automatically back up your data, meaning that you can ensure that you have a solid backup at all times.
- Disaster Recovery: Providers also offer Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) to help you recreate and replicate your whole infrastructure in the worst case.
- Service Level Agreements (SLAs): Cloud providers will provide you with agreements that specify the expected level of service availability, which is a contractual obligation. This means that it’s in their best interest to invest in their infrastructure and ensure maximum uptime to meet the agreed levels, meaning that their infrastructure is more reliable.
These benefits of the cloud mean that your business will ultimately be more resilient in the face of disaster, and will be able to keep on powering through when facing small difficulties.
What to Consider When Migrating to the Cloud
Moving your business to the cloud is a whole process that requires lots of considerations to be made to ensure that the whole process runs smoothly and successfully.
By making these considerations, your cloud strategy will be more robust and beneficial to your business’ wider success —
- Objectives and Strategy: One of the most important parts of any business decision is working out what you want out of it. By pinning down your objectives and your strategy to get there, your cloud strategy will become more coherent.
- Cost Analysis: Keeping up to score with your costs and predicting the total costs — with all expenses — will help you ensure that you’re spending efficiently and only on things that you need.
- Security and Compliance: When moving to the cloud, a focus on ensuring that security and compliance are at their utmost highest throughout your organisation is vital.
- Deployment Model and Strategy: By understanding your organisation’s deployment model (between public, private, and hybrid) and what each of those would require for your organisation, you can make better decisions to ensure that you’re getting the most out of your cloud deployment.
- Monitoring and Reporting: During and after the migration process, ensuring that you have reports and monitoring set up to track success and work out where to improve will help you refine and ensure that your organisation’s cloud setup is at its strongest.
How We Can Help
There are tons of benefits to introducing the cloud to your organisation. Ensuring that the cloud migration process benefits your organisation and that you come into the world of the cloud hitting the ground running is vital for extended success, meaning that important decisions need to be made on your organisation’s cloud future.
If you’re looking to get started but don’t know where to start, get in touch with us today. Our experts are here to guide you and help you start your journey towards cloud migration — and remain with you every step of the way.
Reach out to us now and see how we can help you.
