If you’re still managing your company’s infrastructure and applications on-premises, it may be time to consider moving to the cloud. Cloud computing offers many advantages over traditional data center hosting, from reduced costs to greater scalability and flexibility. As more businesses recognize the cloud’s benefits, on-premises IT is becoming increasingly obsolete.
The cloud solves many of the headaches of maintaining expensive, outdated data centers. You’ll gain access to state-of-the-art hardware, software and services without massive up-front investments. More importantly, your developers will have superpowers like self-service provisioning, database scaling, continuous integration and deployment, and other developer-friendly features. They’ll be able to innovate at lightning speed instead of waiting around for IT to free up rack space or troubleshoot servers.
Here are 10 top reasons you should switch to a cloud service provider.
1. Eliminate Hardware Costs
Hardware expenses never seem to stop in an on-premises environment. There’s always something needing replacement or augmentation as technologies evolve and workloads increase. With a cloud service provider, you won’t have to worry about purchasing, installing, and maintaining your own servers, storage, networking equipment, and other hardware. All that infrastructure is managed for you off-site by the cloud service. This allows you to avoid the high upfront costs of on-premises hardware as well as ongoing maintenance and upgrade expenses.
No more setting aside six figures for that new SAN array or transporting pallets of disks between data centers. The cloud ingest costs for redundant storage tiers too. They even let you experiment with new instance types without long procurement lead times holding you back.
2. Save on Facilities and Utilities
Migrating to a cloud service provider also means you won’t have to maintain a physical data center. No more leasing a building to house servers or paying utility bills to power and cool tons of IT gear. The cloud provider handles all facilities and power management for you, so you can relax knowing your applications have a reliable environment. Now your team can relax, knowing applications run in state-of-the-art, geo-redundant environments completely managed by cloud specialists. All without the hassles of leasing buildings or being on the hook for six-figure utility tabs. That’s a game changer for any size of budget.
3. Scale Resources Up and Down as Needed
With on-premises infrastructure, you have to carefully plan hardware capacity so you have enough to handle anticipated workloads. But usage patterns are hard to predict perfectly, so you often end up with unused capacity or bottlenecks. In the cloud, you can dynamically scale resources up and down as your needs change. Adding more machines for temporary projects is simple, so you only pay for what you actually use.
4. Access to Latest Technologies
Cloud service providers are constantly updating their infrastructure with new servers, storage options, networking technologies, and software features. This allows you to take advantage of the latest technologies without the effort and expense of performing in-house upgrades. You’ll gain access to powerful, evolving features like containers, serverless computing, and more through your cloud provider.
5. Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
With cloud disaster recovery, your cloud service provider keeps a constantly active copy of all virtual machines, storage and networking in separate geographic zones. This means your whole infrastructure is protected if a tornado cuts power to one region; workloads automatically failover within minutes.
Disaster Reports
You gain robust testing since geo-replication is an inherent part of multi-tenant infrastructure. Regular disaster drill reports give assurance that everything will run seamlessly when needed. And compliance worries around data sovereignty fade when your provider stores backups internationally per your specifications.
Less DR Equipment
No more custom-building expensive, dedicated DR equipment. The cloud offers managed, integrated high availability as an inherent service, removing workload from your plate. That’s priceless peace of mind, so you can focus on growing the business instead of stressful “what if” scenarios.
6. Global Reach and Mobility
No matter where your employees, partners, or customers are located globally, they can access cloud-based applications from anywhere via the internet. You gain the flexibility to rapidly scale to new markets or allow remote work without maintaining multiple physical data centers. Cloud service providers also make it much easier to support a mobile workforce that needs IT access while on the go.
7. Pay Only For What You Use
With traditional hosting, you have to pay for server capacity, whether it’s being fully utilized or not. Cloud billing lets you pay a usage-based fee tied only to your actual consumption of resources on an hourly or monthly basis. There are no long-term commitments or costs for idle infrastructure. You control cloud costs by scaling workloads up and down as required.
8. Enable Global Collaboration
Running critical systems and data in the cloud fosters better collaboration between distributed teams. People have shared access to common files, apps, and environments, no matter where they’re located. Employees get simplified access to the tools and information needed to be productive. Developers can easily collaborate on code through cloud-based version control and repositories.
9. Improve IT Agility and Speed
Self-managing infrastructure keeps IT resources occupied with maintenance tasks rather than strategic initiatives. The cloud lets you redirect staff time from system administration to higher-value innovation work. You gain more flexibility to quickly spin up test/dev environments or scale for new projects without hardware procurement delays. IT can rapidly respond to changing business demands.
10. Outsource Security Headaches
On-premises security requires dedicated experts, software, and appliances that are costly to maintain properly. Cloud service providers make heavy investments in robust physical, network, and platform-level security that you benefit from. Compliance worries shift to their highly skilled security teams, so you can focus on your core business. Integrated access control, encryption, firewalls, patching, and more are automatically managed for you as a service.
In Summary
Making the switch to a cloud service provider like AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform offers significant cost savings and operational advantages over traditional hosting. Talk to a cloud migration expert about evaluating your needs and building a plan to smoothly transition applications and workloads to the cloud. The payoffs of agility, scalability, and reduced costs make it worth moving critical systems off-premises and into the cloud.
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