Blog: Why Move to the Cloud? Top 5 Business Benefits to Consider
Blog: Why Move to the Cloud? Top 5 Business Benefits to Consider
This is an exciting time for cloud adoption. Most companies are building their cloud-first strategies to adopt and scale with the future because the cloud is simply better than on-premises datacenters for many companies regardless of current scale. Although some companies are not actively building out the cloud, it is still beneficial for them to have a strategy moving forward. Here are some of the most common drivers that we see:
Scalability
Provisioning your IT infrastructure for your current workload is not a way to ensure you will be able to grow. By moving your servers to the cloud, you can provision and decommission servers at the click of a button. You can only use what you need. In cases of specific workloads, which experience large onsets of spike consumption, you can effectively to scale-out and scale-up as needed during the times of spike. Thus, you are only paying for what you use and need at a given moment as well as scaling up your workloads based on traffic.
Reducing Datacenter Footprint
Let’s be honest here, large energy footprints are bad for business. With public perception focusing in on clean and green businesses, companies with large on-premises datacenters are scrutinized for their consumption. Also, datacenters are a lot for an organization to manage logistically. Therefore, moving them to the cloud makes a lot of the logistical issues disappear. Another thing to note is that traditionally, by taking advantage of PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) and SaaS (Software-as-a-Service), companies are able to modernize their environment as well as reduce their entire manageable servers to only the core infrastructure they need.
Cost
Many cost factors are reduced by switching to the cloud. One of the most prevalent would be physical hardware (server racks, cooling, power, etc.). Physical equipment in the IT world is a constantly depreciating asset due to its shelf life. By switching to the cloud, the actual server equipment is upkept and replaced by the cloud provider – thus making things like hardware refreshes a thing of the past.
Also, there is a reduction in IT staff cost due to a lot of the physical maintenance being done by the cloud provider. You can lock in your rates on your Virtual Machines for a reserved instance pricing to get discounts on Azure (1 year and 3-year reserved instances). However, one of the biggest Azure specific cost savings is by allowing license mobility. If you purchased your licenses and carry Software Assurance on the windows licenses, you can move those licenses to your Virtual Machines within Azure by taking advantage of AHUB Licensing (Azure Hybrid Use Benefit). This makes Azure a very cost-effective solutions for Windows Server heavy environments.
Productivity Increase
With all your servers being one click away, your team is able to access their work from anywhere. While the Cloud provider takes care of the physical maintenance and hardware diagnostics, your staff can focus on things that matter – such as building out a new App Service! By switching to a PaaS option such as a SQL Managed Instance, your team will not have to worry about the server configuration. Therefore, your team can focus on the database itself, instead of how the underlying infrastructure is working and allowing the SQL database to do what it needs. All such factors create a ripple effect of productivity across your entire team.
Reliability
With certain Azure services having a guaranteed uptime up to 99.999%, (Such as CosmosDB), you can achieve high up-time promises to your clients and meet certain regulatory requirements. You are also able to setup availability sets and high-availability configurations to ensure your most business-critical apps are able to achieve the uptime guarantee you need. Also, you are able to take advantage of Azure Site-Recovery for a full DRaaS (Distaster-Recovery-as-a-Service) which works for your Azure and On-Premises machines to ensure that in the case of a disastrous event, you are able to spin up a VM with the data contained on the machine affected in a reasonable amount of time.
By understanding these drivers, Motifworks is able to help clients with their specific needs and work closely with them to determine which solution is best for their company.
Author Bio:
Nicholas Carr
AzureSmart Infra Engineer, Motifworks
Nicholas is responsible for recommending server migration strategies to our clients after analyzing their current physical server usage. When he is not at work, Nicholas spends his time traveling or playing the guitar.
