It’s almost impossible to run a company without hearing about how migrating to the cloud can make business so much easier, cheaper, and more productive. All of these things are definitely true, but if you’re not sure an example of how it can do that, this article will clear things up for you. We reached out to companies with experience in this sector – such as providers of outsourced IT support London companies use, and companies who are partnered with public cloud providers. From this, we have made a rundown of migrating to the cloud, and the benefits it holds.
Migrating to the Cloud
As you are probably aware, a Cloud is an environment containing storage capacity and compute resources that reside over a network. This means that there is no individual physical location where it can be found. Instead, it is pillared by datacentres located in multiple areas across a country, or even around the world. A datacentre is a physical location containing the hardware required to support a cloud.
The most common type of cloud is a public cloud, which is built and maintained by providers who offer customers access to it. When we spoke to one IT support provider London businesses have partnered with in the past, they said that, through them, their customers can be migrated to whichever public cloud they themselves are partnered with.
Benefits of Cloud Migration
There are many benefits to migrating to the cloud. So many, in fact, that it would take a while to list and describe them all. But here are 7 benefits that any business would be happy to see.
1. Simplifies Your IT
It could well be possible that you are already using some form of cloud service in your organization. Nowadays, many businesses are. The trouble is that they are also still using on-premise hardware as part of their IT infrastructure; not to mention legacy software and systems. This patchwork of technologies can be hard to manage holistically; even worse, it could make data governance and security hard to manage effectively. By migrating your entire IT infrastructure to the cloud, you can consolidate all of your workloads and processes, making it much more secure, and much easier to deal with.
2. Ensures Disaster Recovery
In the event of a disaster, you had better hope that none of your critical infrastructures is damaged – which is always a risk when you have on-premise servers containing crucial company data. Hosting all of your data and workloads in the cloud means that no physical disaster can affect them. You could also use the cloud to backup data offsite so that if a disaster does cause your data to be affected, you can use your backup to recover it.
3. Optimizes Remote Working
As we all know now, remote working is normalized in many industries and organizations. If you have staff that is working remotely in your organization, you’ll want to make sure that there are no barriers or obstacles for them to get their work done. The cloud is a great way to ensure this. Many modern solutions for communication and collaboration are cloud-based. For instance, unified communications technology uses the cloud to consolidate all channels of communication – including cloud telephony, videoconferencing, instant messaging, and emails – into a single platform, making it much easier to reach users remotely. Using the cloud to host files and data also means employees can access that data from anywhere, which is essential for remote workers. These are just a few of the ways the cloud supports remote work, but there are many more.
4. Makes Software Development Easier
Nowadays, being able to develop your own software solutions to use internally, or even to support the services you provide to customers, is a huge advantage in business. The cloud makes developing software much easier than it ever used to be. For instance, Platform as a Service (PaaS) is one of the most popular types of cloud service. It is aimed at developers and DevOps engineers because it helps streamline and shorten the software development lifecycle.
5. Future Proofs Your Infrastructure
Ask any IT support company, and they will tell you that the sector is constantly changing. New solutions start to trend every year, and with how reliant we are becoming on technology, failing to adopt new tech can cause a business to fall behind the competition drastically. Fortunately, most of the new technologies that are trending are linked, in one way or another, to cloud computing. This means that if your organization’s infrastructure is cloud-based, it will be much easier for you to integrate new and trending technologies.
