5 Advantages of Moving to the Cloud

While the advantages of moving to the cloud are numerous, we focus on five main areas where your business will reap the most reward. You’ll also learn about terminology and migration strategies.

For a long time, cloud migration has become the rule for companies worldwide, rather than the exception. And with good reason (or reasons) – there are numerous advantages of moving to the cloud.

Cloud computing has become the backbone of modern business, enabling organizations to scale, innovate and adapt with unparalleled agility. As more and more companies recognize the transformative potential of the cloud, the momentum toward cloud adoption has only accelerated.

In this blog, we’ll cover:

The Language of the Cloud

The Advantages of Moving to the Cloud: Five Biggies

• Reduced Costs
• Increased Security
• Expanded Global Reach
• Accelerated Innovation with Leading Technologies
• Promoted Sustainability

The Top Vendors in the Cloud

The Right Way to Enter the Cloud: A Cloud Migration Strategy

The Language of the Cloud

Before we go deep into the benefits of cloud adoption and migration, let’s break out and break down some of the most common and essential cloud terminology you’ll be using to make sense of the cloud and to navigate within it.

General Terms

• On-prem – short for “on-premises.” Simply, the infrastructure you have on-site or leased in a data center.
• TCO – Total Cost of Ownership. How much does running your infrastructure on-prem or in the cloud cost you. When a company considers moving to the cloud, they may run some TCO calculations to compare costs between their current configuration and cloud deployment.
• Elastic Computing. Cloud computing is great because it is flexible. Elastic computing simply means that you can change things like computer processing, memory and storage dynamically based on your needs.

Type of Cloud Services

• IaaS (infrastructure as a service) is the foundational layer of cloud computing, where you rent your infrastructure through a service such as Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure.
• PaaS (platform as a service) allows developers to create and deliver applications via the web. Google App Engine, Force.com, and AWS Elastic Beanstalk.
• SaaS (Software as a Service). Think Gmail, Salesforce and Microsoft Office 365. SaaS is a software application delivered over the internet.

Types of Cloud Deployments

• Private Clouds are cloud services on a private network available only to select users, such as a single business or organization. Your company might maintain this cloud itself, or you may hire a third party to manage it.
• Public Clouds are cloud services available to anyone via a third-party provider. Common examples of public clouds are Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure.
• Hybrid Cloud is a combination of private and public clouds.

The Advantages of Moving to the Cloud: Five Biggies

Why are companies moving to the cloud? There are many reasons, but the main advantages of making their infrastructure and applications cloud-based are reducing costs, increasing security, expanding global reach, and accelerating innovation.

1. Reduced Costs

Running a data center is expensive. Rent, air conditioning, and physical security add up — even before you start paying for the servers themselves and the people who maintain them! But you can manage all this with cloud cost optimization strategies, which match the best and most cost-efficient cloud resources with each application or workload. Here are some of the best practices in this regard.

• Look at vendor pricing, then set your budgets. Since vendors explain the cost of their services in the billing details, you can identify and prioritize the high-cost services and workflows and determine where you can save money. Then, you can get all the stakeholders together (product and engineering leadership and executives) to understand and base cost requirements on the planned packaging and delivery of features and products and set monthly budgets accordingly.
• Tighten up on resource waste. Find out what resources you’re not using or are under-using (e.g., a temporary server you forgot to de-provision), and remove them. Identify and merge idle resources to cut costs. (e.g., using only 10 percent of your central processing unit but paying for 100 percent usage).
• Use right-sizing tools to analyze computing resources and revise them to their most efficient sizes. These tools can also recommend how to make these changes across instance families.
• Put reserve and spot instances in place. Reserved instances let you prepay for compute instances over an extended period in exchange for sharp pricing discounts of up to 75 percent. Spot instances offer low prices for last-minute buys, but their best use is for batch jobs or jobs you can wrap up quickly rather than vital, lengthy tasks.
• Limit data transfer fees. Migrating data from a public cloud can be expensive, as vendors often charge for shifting data from their platforms. You can minimize these transfer fees by knowing what it will cost to secure and speed up data transfers between the cloud and private data centers and properly adjusting the cloud architecture.
• Go with a cloud-native design. Cloud-native systems best use cloud-specific capabilities to provide the most flexible, scalable and cost-efficient performance. Designing a system with auto-scaling, for example, requires you to pay only for the servers you use.

While the above options apply to the cloud as a whole, the points concerning idle and under-used resources, reserve and spot instances, rightsizing, and cloud-native design also can simplify cost management – and, as a result, lower costs – in multicloud and hybrid cloud deployments.

Scheduling instances so that they only run during specific hours or automatically stopping unused instances can positively impact costs, too. But there are also effective practices that particularly address multicloud cost optimization.

• A consistent tagging and resource allocation strategy throughout your clouds can accurately assign costs to teams, projects, or applications, allowing you to track costs precisely.
• Automated cost controls can impose budget discipline, create alerts for cost discrepancies and establish demand- or schedules-based resource scaling.
• You can apply cost-effective pricing models (e.g., committed use discounts) based on assessing workload characteristics and usage patterns across different cloud providers.
• A centralized cost management platform can consolidate cost data from all your cloud providers, enabling integrated visibility, cost allocation, and analysis suggestions.
• Multicloud governance, in concert with FinOps, can ensure that cloud spending fits business objectives and that teams and projects are transparent about and accountable for their costs.

Cloud computing providers like Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure keep costs low by using automation and economies of scale. By aggregating cloud usage from hundreds of thousands of clients, cloud providers can deliver significant and lower pay-as-you-go prices.

You don’t have to invest in fixed technologies such as data centers and physical servers. They give you multiple payment options that let you pay only for the capacity you need when you need it.

Automation can optimize cloud spend in several ways:

• Autoscaling, which automatically detects, adds, or eliminates computer resources for cloud environments or applications
• Cost alerts, which notify you when you hit cost thresholds you have configured
• Resource utilization monitoring to help you avoid spending more than you anticipated on a service
• Documenting or tracking resources to know when to shut them down
• Host patch management, which can spot security vulnerabilities and potential environmental risks by updating patches with improved software and functionality and the latest firmware
• Dependency management, which can protect program- and service-related dependencies safe from cyber-attacks by automating manual processes such as policy enforcement, license compliance, building from source, and package-signature validation

2. Increase Security

 Just like with your on-premises servers, you are responsible for securing your data in the cloud. This includes application security, identity and access management, client and server-side encryption, and firewall configuration.

However, your cloud provider takes responsibility for securing the cloud itself so that you have less to worry about. This typically means they handle physical access to data centers, uninterruptible power supplies, air conditioning, and fire suppression.

Where your responsibility is concerned, there are some proven best practices that you can adopt for optimal protection of your data.

• Apply data encryption to cloud data at rest and in migration. It requires tough encryption protocols so that even intercepted data remains secure. It is a continuous process, not a one-time activity.
• Understand the shared responsibility model, which sets out the security responsibilities of the cloud provider (securing the underlying infrastructure) and the customer (protecting their data, applications, and user access) so that businesses can determine which security controls to put in place.
• Create and enforce robust cloud security policies covering data protection, incident response, access control, and compliance. These policies automatically enforce compliance standards in every cloud deployment.
• Implement security measures to secure endpoints, including laptops, workstations, and mobile devices, such as antivirus software, malware protection, software, firewalls, and secure communications protocols. Businesses should also set up endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions to conduct real-time monitoring and management of endpoint security.
• Enable and monitor security logs to see what users are doing, what’s happening with system events, and the traffic on the network. These logs are essential for developing user behavioral analytics to spot suspicious activities and probe security incidents.
• Develop a cloud incident response plan to protect against and, when necessary, confront cyberattacks. The plan should clearly stipulate what measures to take if a security breach occurs, including communication protocols, roles and responsibilities, and recovery procedures.
• DevSecOps is a secure software development lifecycle (SSDLC) procedure that integrates security into the first stages of software development. It uses automation tools to analyze code for identified vulnerabilities and give developers feedback in real time.

We have another blog that dives deep into cloud security, compliance regulations, and best practices. For more information about increased security, you can read it here.

3. Expanded Global Reach

Another advantage of moving to the cloud is that you can much more easily get your applications and data closer to your customers. In a traditional model, you would need to deploy servers all around the globe — a time-consuming and costly approach.

In this same vein, edge computing is a vanguard technology that enables processing huge amounts of data with less latency and high availability by bringing cloud resources much nearer to where the data is developed and deployed. This saves data from lengthy trips through centralized data centers in distant sites.

But there’s another way to achieve a larger geographical footprint through the cloud, which instead embraces the distributed deployment of equipment to yield operational benefits.

Adopting a multicloud or hybrid-cloud environment also can make it easier for businesses to expand their operations globally. For definition purposes, multicloud engages multiple cloud providers simultaneously to furnish services and deploys workloads across different cloud platforms. Hybrid-cloud integrates on-premises infrastructure with private or public cloud services in a unified cloud environment to make workloads portable and flexible.

Using a variety of cloud providers with data centers in strategic locations makes it possible to minimize latency – how much time elapses after data is requested for it to travel across a network – and stay in compliance with data sovereignty laws. It can also spread data access to different regions and leverage cloud services for scalability and redundancy, enhancing the global customer and employee user experience.

AI has its role to play in growing the cloud’s global influence because cloud hyperscalers – major global cloud providers who offer an almost bottomless supply of computer, database and storage capacity – offer many readily deployable AI cloud computing solutions themselves (e.g., data extraction, data anomaly detection, and chatbots and virtual agents) or piggyback these solutions atop their cloud infrastructure.

4. Accelerated Innovation with Leading Technologies

The cloud is flexible, allowing you to select the operating systems, databases, web application platforms, and other services you may need. Since you are not locked into one single setup, you can experiment to find what works best for you – and, in the process, accelerate enterprise-wide innovation to keep you ahead of the competitive curve. Let’s look at some of the forward-leaning technologies driving that innovation.

By eliminating the underlying server infrastructure, serverless architecture allows developers to concentrate on writing code for new cloud applications without bothering with server management. Serverless computing streamlines workflows and accelerates the development process, cutting time to market by as much as 70 percent.

We’ve already mentioned edge computing in one respect. Here’s another: by positioning data processing and storage closer to where the data originates – and subsequently slashing latency by as much as 90 percent — edge computing is a perfect solution for deploying real-time applications such as IoT devices and autonomous vehicles. By making data processing conveniently local, edge computing can cut the data flow to the cloud by up to 80 percent.

Containerization has become integral to delivering cloud-native solutions. More than 90 percent of respondents surveyed in a Cloud Native Computing Foundation Report said they rely on containers and associated technologies for much or almost all of their cloud-native application development and deployment.

Containers consolidate an application’s code and related dependencies in a single virtual package so that the code can operate in any environment. Their lightweight structure — they have no operating system and a much smaller resource footprint than virtual machines — gives them superior agility and efficiency in deploying applications to the cloud.

Digital transformation is at the center of cloud innovation, and this is where AI and ML (machine learning) come in. Combining cloud analytics with AI and ML into a single platform does several things.

• It provides on-demand and dependable access to servers, storage, databases and software on a scalable, flexible and cost-effective basis.
• It empowers organizations to find, amass, cleanse, store, and manage data from multiple sources in cloud-based repositories such as data lakes and warehouses.
• It integrates and transforms data from multiple sources into a common template or format for analysis so that organizations can get meaningful, granular insights from diverse data sets.
• It lets organizations extract insights from unstructured text data, such as customer feedback, sales collateral, and industry use cases.
• It uses historical data patterns to predict future trends and outcomes.
• It detects data anomalies and outliers to detect potential operational issues and to train and refine ML models to yield more accurate outcomes.
• It exploits the cloud infrastructure’s scalability and elasticity for real-time data processing and delivers insights and predictions in close-to-real-time.

Adopting a multicloud strategy certainly is an innovation incubator in a formal sense. Since you can access a wide array of tools and services across different cloud platforms, you can use each provider’s unique technology offerings to develop advanced solutions that promote business growth and put you in a strong competitive position.

But opting for a multicloud approach also lets you feel the optimal advantage of moving to the cloud and those best-of-breed tools by having a transformative impact on business operations in several ways.

• More reliability. A multicloud strategy distributes applications across multiple clouds, so you have the high availability you need to keep critical operations going even when there’s a provider outage.
• Cost optimization to save money. Because you can choose services from multiple cloud vendors, you can use competitive pricing and optimize their total cost of ownership. The result is you can buy those leading-edge technologies – and more of them – at more affordable prices.
• More flexibility and agility. Using multiple-cloud vendors lets businesses choose the best solutions for their particular needs, making it easier to adapt to changing business circumstances. This flexibility feeds into innovation by allowing organizations to experiment with technologies and services that a lone vendor couldn’t provide.
• Less latency, more connectivity. Drawing upon the point we made earlier in this blog about expanding global outreach, moving cloud services closer to their customers reduces latency big-time, so you have better connectivity and user experiences. A good example would be a global streaming service that deploys servers worldwide so that local users get content with very little delay. The ensuing higher quality of service also equals higher customer satisfaction.

5. Promoted Sustainability

The above advantages largely adhere to the organizations entering the cloud – and by, extension, to their customers, for whom the improved operational efficiency delivered by the cloud yields a better customer experience. But there is another advantage of moving to the cloud that appeals not only to the business that goes there but also to the larger world in terms of how companies contribute to a cleaner environment by adopting sustainability measures.

Cloud computing is an example of sustainable technology, or green IT, in action. Cloud platforms reduce the carbon footprint associated with hardware by letting companies cut down on physical infrastructure by storing data on external servers. Why? Because hardware is a daily, greedy energy consumer, it depletes resources when it’s manufactured and creates an emissions trail when it’s transported to customers throughout the world.

Eliminating all that infrastructure and associated devices can cut carbon dioxide emissions by as much as 84 percent. Virtualizing the hardware equals fewer physical servers and less energy consumed for heating and cooling.

Given how the cloud enhances productivity and facilitates workflow, it increases use rates. That, in turn, saves energy and lessens the environmental toll from your energy consumption. The extent to which cloud computing encourages remote work also acts to depress carbon emissions from passenger travel and the hardware you don’t have running onsite.

Then, there is the energy efficiency of cloud computing. For instance, Microsoft says that Microsoft Cloud is between 22 and 93 percent more efficient than conventional data centers. Moving to Microsoft Azure can shrink the carbon footprint by up to 98 percent. The company has also said Azure will be 100 percent powered by renewable energy by 2025.

However, the cloud poses an environmental challenge since the data centers powered by cloud providers consume a lot of energy, create noise pollution, and generate e-waste that goes into landfills, which can pollute the soil and groundwater. Organizations are developing innovative ways to achieve sustainability to cope with the challenge.

• Auto scaling allows businesses to dynamically adjust the number of server instances according to changing demand, so they can scale resources up or down as needed. This scaling means less energy use and a smaller carbon footprint.
• Consolidation gathers and organizes workloads onto fewer servers, eliminates redundant systems, and introduces economies of scale, which minimizes energy consumption.
• Right-sizing, where server instances are aligned with workload requirements, helps businesses efficiently allocate resources to create an optimal balance between performance, use and energy efficiency. This avoids resource overprovisioning or under-use, which can waste energy.
• Efficient storage is another way to cut energy consumption and costs. Different methods exist, including solid-state drives (SSDs), which consume less power and generate less heat than typical hard disk drives. Data deduplication and compression techniques reduce data volume and storage space and, accordingly, the amount of energy needed to store and transmit the data. As a result, energy costs come down, and the carbon footprint gets smaller.
• Network optimization minimizes latency and decreases data transfer volumes through techniques such as caching mechanisms, content delivery networks (CDNs), and compression. As a result, less data is transferred over the network, so less energy is consumed.
• Green data centers are making the cloud more energy-efficient by employing leading-edge technologies such as efficient cooling systems (which use less energy to cool the same amount of equipment than a traditional data center), advanced power management techniques (which ensure a higher power density than in a traditional data center, so more equipment can be run on the same amount of power), and the integration of renewable energy sources.

The Top Vendors in the Cloud

Once a company decides to move to the cloud, choosing a vendor is one of the hardest decisions it will make. There is no right or wrong answer here, as the decision depends on your company’s specific needs.

To help you start this process, here’s a rundown of the most popular providers in IaaS (infrastructure as a service), PaaS (platform as a service), and SaaS (software as a service).

The Leaders

Hands down, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) are currently dominating the cloud service providers space, given that they comprise 66 percent of the global cloud infrastructure market.

AWS is best known for its focus on IaaS. With over 100 Availability Zones spanning 31 geographic regions, it accounts for more than 34 percent of the worldwide cloud computing market.

Microsoft Azure, with 23 percent of the global market share, delivers more than 200 cloud services through the Azure Cloud in more than 116 Availability Zones in IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and edge and serverless computing formats.

GCP offers services similar to those of AWS and Azure, though it established a niche through innovations in AL, ML, data analytics, and Kubernetes, the container management platform. Its global market share is 12 percent.

The Next Tier

Below the big three are a few other cloud market players.

Alibaba – Asia’s largest cloud service provider, has about a five percent global market share.

IBM Cloud Services – provides more than 170 products in the on-premises, hybrid-cloud and multicloud categories, owning about four percent of the market.

Salesforce – the first to offer the SaaS model in its current form, has about a three percent market share and offers multiple cloud-based applications in marketing, sales, experience, analytics, commerce, and service (Salesforce Cloud also powers the company’s emblematic customer service management (CSM) suite of tools).

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) – with a three percent market share, was the first vendor to combine IaaS, Paas and SaaS cloud delivery models in one platform. It has a distributed cloud portfolio that – like the big three CSP leaders – is available in many places throughout the world and accepts pay-as-you-go pricing.

DigitalOcean Cloud – the third-largest hosting company worldwide, mainly offers compute and storage products, and has an IaaS focus is on small and medium businesses.

Tencent Cloud – a major presence in China that also deploys across 26 regions in more than 70 availability zones and is known for a host of cloud computing services (e.g., cloud virtual machines, cloud file storage).

Huawei Cloud – has nearly a fifth of the China cloud market and delivers a wide range of cloud computing services across 170 countries.

Dell Technologies Cloud – furnishes an enterprise-grade, integrated multicloud platform and emphasizes storage and data protection services.

Cisco Cloud Solutions – though a latecomer to the cloud market (having launched their Global InterCloud solution just 10 years ago), nevertheless is highly regarded for its hybrid cloud solutions and is celebrated for rigorous security protocols to ensure data protection and privacy in multiple environments.

Rackspace – has a portfolio of public, private and hybrid cloud solutions best suited to meet unpredictable cloud computing needs.

The Right Way to Enter the Cloud: a Cloud Migration Strategy

A successful move to the cloud requires a systematic approach that clarifies the overarching business goals and user needs, defines a detailed structure for cloud operations and how to implement it, initiates the move and defines its business value, and creates the groundwork for making the cloud a profitable, scalable venture subject to rigorous, enterprise-wide cloud management.

There is a proven set of cloud migration strategies, first developed by Gartner and then refined by AWS to fit the evolution and maturation of the cloud and how organizations were taking an increasingly sophisticated approach to cloud migration. They’re known, in shorthand, as the 7 R’s.

Rehost

This strategy uses cloud IaaS tools to transfer all application data and workflows to cloud services aligned with the workload’s present storage, networking and computing requirements. This allows enterprises to move any on-premises application and its associated dependencies to the cloud.

Containerization, which we discussed previously, is the means for implementing rehosting, also known as lift-and-shift, since it involves compacting these legacy applications into containers and placing them into a cloud computing environment.

If organizations want to build cloud applications with microservices – whose architecture uses multiple, interdependent software components to provide a functional application – it requires the software tool that undergirds containerization to package microservices as programs that can be deployed on multiple platforms.

Rehosting is for organizations that want to do an expedited migration at a very low cost while keeping their options open for the future.

Relocate

This approach migrates workloads, such as a collection of on-premises servers, to a cloud version of the same platform – and does it without affecting ongoing operations, rewriting the application source code, or needing to buy new hardware.

Relocation lessens downtime and disruption because clients stay seamlessly connected during migration, and it doesn’t require big changes in the configuration and architecture of the workloads. This pertains to applications running on VM servers and local Kubernetes distributions.

Replatform

This strategy lets an enterprise move an application to the cloud without using platform optimization to exploit cloud-native capabilities. The application source code and core architecture stay the same, so legacy applications can continue operating, and cloud-based compliance and security can be assured.

Since businesses can modernize their workloads without rewriting the application code, they save time and money on migration. This would appeal to businesses thinking about migration but are leery of the risks of a total, all-at-once migration of legacy applications.

Refactor

With refactoring, workloads are rearchitected to support cloud-native functionality from the ground up. Despite the time and resources required to make this happen, refactoring compensates for that by empowering applications to support advanced capabilities such as autoscaling, serverless computing, and distributed load balancing.

Refactoring makes sense for complex, high-usability applications with a solid business case for performance optimization.

Repurchase

With repurchasing, an organization replaces internally administered systems with third-party managed services from the cloud provider. This moves the enterprise to a consumption-based SaaS model linking IT costs to generated revenue.

The repurchase model requires less work managing infrastructure for in-house teams, simplifies and expedites migration, decreases downtime, and increases scalability and regulatory governance efficiency. Repurchasing is a good choice if you want to exploit cloud-native capabilities without designing brand-new systems.

Retire

The first of the two AWS contributions is used to terminate or downsize applications that are no longer productive. Essential business workloads based on inefficient legacy platforms are retired to begin the process of adopting modern, cloud-native deployments. Retirement is suited to redundant workloads.

Retain

The other AWS addition applies to applications that can’t be retired and should continue operations in their current framework. Typically, the workload would be retained if it depends upon another application that must be migrated first or if there isn’t any business value in migrating the application to the cloud. Organizations that need to control their resources or think of hybrid cloud migration are the best candidates for this strategy.

The success of your cloud migration may also depend upon how quickly you can implement applications. This is where cloud-native development comes into play. Cloud-based developments can slow down that process because they require buying new hardware and setting up software and because the specialized software configuration or hardware migration involved with these developments could interrupt implementation. Since cloud-native developments don’t need any hardware or software, and their microservice architecture makes interruptions unlikely, they take less time to deploy.

Before You Take Advantage of Moving to the Cloud

If you have established the business case for moving your organization to the cloud, it would be wise to engage a seasoned IT company and cloud service provider to discuss what cloud services will meet your business needs.

Cloud migration needs to be strategic and business-specific, and pursuing the process with a consultant who can analyze your technology landscape and business applications can help you make the right choices to successfully enter and thrive in the cloud.

Don’t let cloud complexity hold you back. Our Cloud specialists can help you navigate the cloud landscape and find the perfect fit for your organization. Get started now