1. Optimized & scalable infrastructure

There’s no flexibility with a physical infrastructure – whenever the need for capacity rises, you’re held back by its limitations and waste possible opportunities. On the other hand, when the capacity decreases, you’re wasting money by paying for unused resources.

The answer to that problem lies in the cloud environment, where technologies like virtualization and containerization boost flexibility. Virtualization lets you run multiple virtual machines on a single physical server, while containerization isolates applications and their dependencies into lightweight, portable containers. Both make resource management much more efficient and scaling up or down faster and more cost-effective.

Cloud services also bring native capabilities like pay-as-you-go models, giving you the flexibility to adjust resources as needs change. On top of that, abstracting cloud infrastructure can help optimize costs in the long run. While the initial setup might cost more, these strategies usually lead to lower costs per unit over time, offering more control and flexibility – especially when handling complex environments.

In the cloud, your resources can be adjusted as needed, and new services can be adopted in minutes. Its inherent flexibility allows you to adjust your resources as needed, as well as adopt new services, within minutes. It’s a sure way of maximizing efficiency on several fronts, since it also saves the time of IT experts; instead of wasting their energy on managing the computing platforms, they can focus on their core responsibilities that directly affect your revenue.

Building your own infrastructure is a time-consuming task, even if the process itself is smooth sailing. But with the cloud, you can take off in minutes, reducing time-to-market to bare minimum. This technology’s constant and reliable presence, along with the efficiency of virtualization and containerization, gives you the agility that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.

2. Innovative mindset & access to a variety of resources

Innovation starts with the culture, where experimentation is both encouraged and enabled by the internal processes. Sadly, budget restrictions can become an obstacle too difficult to overcome, especially in systems that aren’t scalable.

It’s a different story with the cloud – testing features of new services doesn’t require an upfront investment, and the service itself can be scaled up or shut down at once, depending on the results. This limits financial risks by leaps and bounds while fostering an innovation culture.

Moreover, many cutting-edge services, such as OpenAI, Databricks, Snowflake, and others, are only available on the cloud, providing you with access to innovative tools that would otherwise be out of reach. You can count on cloud providers to keep their technology up-to-date, looking for new ways of gaining a competitive edge over the other providers. Along with the core service, you’ll also gain access to powerful tools and libraries that support the agile way of managing the cloud environment, on top of the option to create your own resources.

3. Potential cost reduction

Whether you’ll save money by moving to the cloud depends entirely on your business and its needs. Calculations will be necessary to find out how it will benefit your finances, considering:

• Reduced recurring IT expenses – you may not need to maintain physical infrastructure, but depending on the model, managing cloud resources may still require some level of oversight and management,
• You only pay for what you need – the simplified and flexible pricing allows you to adjust the required capacity, never wasting any resources,
• Steady-stated workloads come with discounts – cloud providers often come up with ways to forge long-term business relationships,
• Decrease in CapEx (investments made for long-term benefits in the future) – cloud removes the need to buy your own data center equipment, lowering the upfront investment costs.

4. Swift delegation of problems

Forget about distracting your IT experts with the physical infrastructure’s issues. Instead, delegate the problem-solving to the helpdesk, which is often part of the deal with your cloud provider.

5. Tighter security

Multiple levels of security make you more resistant to hacking efforts. In the cloud environment, your provider stays accountable for the physical infrastructure, while you hold responsibility for the access itself. This shared responsibility security model doesn’t only better protect your business, but also allows you to outsource a myriad of tasks to your partner, who has different resources at hand.

For example, Google Cloud’s security goes way beyond what you'd find at an average private facility. They have a strong perimeter defense system, round-the-clock surveillance, biometric access, and security guards on-site 24/7. Plus, their data centers are protected by six layers of physical security and multiple logical controls on the machines themselves. On top of that, they have disaster recovery plans, emergency backup generators, and data distributed across different locations.

Note that while this can strengthen your overall security, it does mean you lose direct control over the physical security of your assets.

Proven cloud migration strategies

Migrating your applications and data to the new environment has been polished to perfection by now, with several options available, listed from the less to the most impactful:

• Retire: sometimes, there’s no other choice but to shut down systems that proved to be inefficient, costly, or simply outdated.
• Retain: not all data or applications are suitable for moving – taking into account its complexity or regulatory compliance, sometimes it’s best to keep certain parts on-premise.
• Rehost: the simplest strategy with the lowest impact, where the data is swiftly migrated without any additional actions.
• Repurchase: in this case, the data isn’t just migrated, it’s also moved to another product – for example, by switching from a traditional license to a SaaS model.
• Replatform: here, you also make improvements that are possible thanks to the cloud technology while migrating the data. It can be a great opportunity to introduce CaaS or PaaS, for example.
• Re-architect: this strategy is often the most costly and time-consuming, as it involves restructuring the data into new architectures, such as microservices, to achieve new levels of efficiency.

Conclusions

Moving to the cloud includes risks, but there are hefty rewards waiting for those brave enough to take these steps. Most importantly, it prepares you for the future dictated by scalability and the agile approach, where any business pivots or changes become much easier. All it takes is a careful consideration of your circumstances and needs, and a reliable partner who will guide you through the process.