Cloud Services are a critical part of business operations in today’s digital world. It offers enterprises the scalability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness needed to optimize operations and thrive in their competitive marketspaces.
Thus, it’s no surprise that businesses across all industries are migrating to the cloud. Nonetheless, migrating to the cloud can be challenging and complex, particularly for organizations lacking the requisite resources and expertise.
In the end though, the benefits of cloud migration are worth the investment. In the following article we will cover what we think the business benefits of cloud migration are.
What is Cloud Migration?
As the name suggests, cloud migration entails moving your core business operations to the cloud and all the products that make a move possible. Typically, cloud providers such as Google, AWS, and Microsoft offer all the tools and services needed to move your applications and workloads to the cloud. Nonetheless, most enterprises need more resources and technical skills to manage the migration independently.
Partnering with a managed cloud service provider is a no-brainer for such organizations. These experts eliminate the stress and uncertainty of moving your digital assets to the cloud while providing a custom-made and all-inclusive cloud migration solution.
Why Do Companies Migrate to the Cloud?
There are several reasons why your organization should consider partnering with a Managed Cloud Service provider when migrating to the cloud. These include:
1. Enhanced Flexibility and Scalability
By migrating to the cloud, you access critical infrastructure that can help your business upscale or downscale resources depending on its needs. In addition, it helps to enhance flexibility and agility. When you migrate your applications and workloads to the cloud, it will be easy for customers and employees to access your cloud infrastructure from anywhere.
In today’s post-COVID world, where remote working and online shopping are the new norms, such flexibility makes it easier for your enterprise to venture into new territories, offer remote work opportunities, and serve a global market. Cloud computing facilitates BYOD initiatives and remote work. Furthermore, partnering with a reputable CSP could also mean benefiting from productivity-boosting applications.
In terms of scalability, cloud computing allows your organization to upscale and support larger workloads and more users. The same cannot be said of on-premises IT infrastructure, which is limited and requires you to purchase and establish additional physical servers, software licenses, and networking equipment.
2. Cost Savings
Cloud infrastructure negates the need to invest in expensive hardware. This is one of the many benefits of cloud migration. Besides reducing your IT costs, the benefits of cloud migration for business is that it significantly lessens your IT team’s workload. In addition, companies that migrate to the cloud often lower their IT operations budgets since managed cloud service providers handle upgrades and maintenance.
According to Tech Republic, an organization can reduce IT spending by 30 to 50% by migrating to the cloud. Rather than worrying about keeping things up and running, your organization can focus on its core business besides allocating more resources to critical business needs.
If you optimize your cloud resources, migrating to the cloud can also enhance the predictability of your spending. Businesses that migrate to the cloud only need to pay for the service they procure. Typically, this gets done on a pay-as-you-go basis rather than investing in costly and one-dimensional on-premise equipment.
3. Improved Performance
With cloud computing, users have faster access to critical resources. They also benefit from enhanced application performance which enhances productivity and customer satisfaction. For customer-facing businesses, in particular, cloud migration can help improve performance and overall user experience.
A case in point is whereby a website or app is hosted on cloud-based servers rather than on-premises servers. When using the app or website, data won’t travel considerably far to reach the users, minimizing latency. Conversely, on-premises infrastructure is primarily inflexible. As a result, workload performance tends to degrade when such infrastructure gets subjected to more usage, translating into higher costs.
4. Enhanced Security
Cloud computing is renowned for its robust security measures that help businesses protect their applications and data from cyber threats. With cybercriminals getting better by the day, migrating your workloads, data, and apps to the cloud couldn’t have arrived more apt. Conversely, maintaining your on-premises infrastructure comes with the risk of compromising critical customer and company data.
With all eyes fixed on data security and data protection laws and regulations, your business must invest in the most secure solutions for storing and managing its data. Cloud computing offers unmatched security as far as protecting your digital assets is concerned.
Most CSPs provide:
- Application security.
- Multi-factor authentication.
- Real-time threat detection.
- Comprehensive security reviews across users’ cloud environments.
With such security measures in place, it’s easy to maintain data security and minimize the threat of breaches.
What Are the Steps Involved in Cloud Migration?
There are many types of cloud migration, but generally our cloud migration strategy includes the following steps:
1. Pre-Migration Assessment
This phase of the migration process entails evaluating your organization’s existing infrastructure and pinpointing assets needed to migrate to the cloud. The performance gains the business hopes to achieve will also be assessed. Establishing goals for the migration help your business determine whether the process was successful.
2. Migration Planning
At this stage, you’re required to develop a migration strategy, select a suitable cloud provider, and estimate the costs. During migration planning, you also need to determine the role of your cloud infrastructure. For example, will it be for DevOps, disaster recovery, or another function?
At this stage, assessing your cloud environment and pinpointing the factors guiding the migration is best. It’s equally important to ensure that data compliance requirements are met. These considerations will help you create a solid migration plan, identify the tools you’ll need, and pinpoint the data that will be migrated and when.
3. Data Migration
Arguably, this is the most critical stage when migrating to the cloud and involves moving data from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud. You should only migrate your data after mapping out the process. A significant challenge you’ll encounter is managing the process with minimal disruption to normal business operations. During the migration, ensuring all workload elements can work in the new environment is critical. An example of this would be migration to Microsoft 365, which is becoming increasingly popular among small to mid-size businesses.
4. Application Migration
This involves moving all your applications to the cloud, synchronizing them, and testing them to ensure they work correctly. You risk disrupting your business operations if your apps become inaccessible to users during the migration. The same applies as you sync and update the apps after the initial migration.
For this reason, it’s best to synchronize changes made to your apps while the migration is ongoing. Fortunately, most cloud providers offer in-built tools to help in app migration.
5. Post-Migration Support
Cloud migration doesn’t stop at moving your workloads and apps to the cloud. Once the move has happened, it’s best to ensure your data is optimized, secure, and retrievable. A cloud migration service provides various post-migration services, including monitoring your cloud environment for real-time changes and predicting workload contentions. Post-migration support also entails assessing data security at rest to ensure that your cloud environments meet regulatory requirements.
The After-Migration Benefits of Cloud Migration
After migrating to the cloud, businesses often experience a range of ongoing benefits that reinforce why cloud migration is important. Beyond immediate improvements like flexibility and cost savings, the cloud enables easy scalability to support growth and innovation over time. Enhanced data backup, better disaster recovery options, and stronger security protocols help companies protect valuable information and stay resilient in changing environments.
Plus, with seamless access to the latest tools and resources, businesses can maintain a competitive edge, adapt to new demands, and improve overall productivity and collaboration across teams.
Conclusion
In summary, the cloud migration business benefits are clear: greater flexibility, reduced costs, enhanced security, and increased performance make it an advantageous move for companies of all sizes. By understanding each step of the migration process and what to expect post-migration, businesses can unlock the full potential of the cloud. Embracing this shift not only supports growth but also drives innovation, allowing companies to stay competitive in a digital-first world.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
What is the main goal of cloud migration?
The main goal is to move a company’s digital assets to the cloud to improve scalability, reduce costs, and enhance performance and security.
What are the 4 advantages of cloud?
Cloud services allow for easy scalability, cost savings through pay-as-you-go pricing, stronger security, and better collaboration options for remote work.
What are the benefits of adopting the cloud?
Cloud adoption lowers IT costs, speeds up resource access, improves disaster recovery, and fosters innovation with the latest technology.
What are the opportunities of cloud migration?
Cloud migration offers businesses modernization, greater agility, enhanced data analytics, and support for digital transformation and remote work.