Real-time communication and Improved Customer Service:
Cloud solutions enable your customers to stay in touch with your company and they allow your customers to easily connect with the staff to resolve their queries or give feedback instantly. This kind of real-time communication can help you attract and engage customers with your business.
Eliminating the high cost:
Moving to the cloud gives organizations the benefit of eliminating the high cost of hardware and installation as it allows them to opt for a subscription-based model that suits their budget.
In addition to this, most cloud solutions provide enterprises with the ability to pay for exactly what they need instead of paying for unwanted or unused services.
Quick implementation cycle:
Enterprises enjoy the advantage of a quick implementation cycle where products usually go live within weeks instead of months. Further, cloud technology improves collaboration among teams as it allows your teams to easily access, edit, and share documents and data from anywhere at any time. This leads to enhanced productivity and efficiency and gives you real-time updates through cloud-based workflow and file-sharing apps.
Promotes Scalability:
Once you move to the cloud, you don’t have to constantly change software whenever you scale up or down. This promotes the scalability of the business and allows the company to grow as per its specific needs.
Upgrades and Maintenance:
The upgrades and maintenance in the case of the cloud are seamless and frequent. Customers using cloud-based software always enjoy the advantage of being on the latest version.
Better Security:
The cloud is generally more safe and secure as compared to on-premises infrastructure. Moving to a cloud solution makes sure that none of your confidential data is vulnerable to hackers or those who aren’t authorized and saves it from common security threats.
Better Document Control:
Employees can send files to a central place where everyone can access them. Further, with your applications and infrastructure hosted on the cloud, you place yourself in an ecosystem where there is continuous innovation. Several technological advancements are being taken care of and implemented by your cloud partner.
Multiple Options:
Cloud computing offers businesses a host of applications under one of the below services:
- Software as a service (SaaS)
- Platform as a service (PaaS)
- Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
Customers also have the option to create private, public, or hybrid network access.
Apart from such endless possibilities, cloud computing also offers enterprises the benefit of adapting to any kind of business change.
Environment-Friendly:
Adopting cloud tech allows you to reduce your carbon footprint as you can easily scale up and down as per your specific business requirements. It gives you the benefit of only using the resources which you need and saving yourself from leaving oversized footprints.
Disaster Recovery:
Regardless of the size, businesses often spend a huge chunk of their money on disaster recovery. Cloud computing can help organizations, especially small businesses, to save their time, and resources, avoid high investment, and get benefited from third-party expertise.
What is Cloud Migration?
Cloud migration refers to the process of moving an enterprise’s data, server, and resources from a physical location to a cloud infrastructure. There can be other types of cloud migration including –
- Cloud-to-cloud migration – where the migration happens from one cloud service provider to another.This migration approach is called a cloud-to-cloud migration. For example, you can switch from Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to either Microsoft Azure Cloud Services or Amazon Web Services (AWS), and vice versa
- Reverse cloud migration or de-clouding – where applications and data are shifted back to the local data center.
What is the purpose of migrating to the clouds?
- The strategic shift from the on-premise enterprise IT models to highly sophisticated cloud-based ones have resulted in great benefits and several technological improvements to businesses. Improved reliability, business scalability, uninterrupted service, better disaster recovery, and business continuity are some of the prominent reasons driving an increasing number of businesses to adopt cloud computing technologies proactively.
- But, when it comes to adopting cloud solutions, one of the most crucial aspects to ensure optimal benefits of the technology is a successful implementation strategy.
- This makes it very important for organizations to spend an ample amount of time in planning the cloud migration strategy and monitor it at every stage.
Best Practices for a Seamless Cloud Migration:
Irrespective of the size of the organization, migrating to the cloud comes with certain challenges. Business and IT leaders have several important decisions to make during the process, including which applications to migrate and how to successfully connect such activities to their specific business use cases.
Some of the important things you can do for a seamless cloud migration include –
- Mapping Out a Detailed Migration Strategy
- Train Your Staff Adequately
- Identify and Understand Workloads
- Create a Robust Cloud Governance Framework
- Further, it should include various tools, policies, objectives, and measures to allow your enterprise to migrate to the cloud with minimal risk and maximum value.
- Network Management
- Proper Monitoring and Governance
Cloud Migration Strategies:
The first step is to choose a cloud deployment model and platform that fits your business use cases.
There are four cloud computing deployment models: private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud, and multi-cloud.
A provider’s platform is one of three types of cloud computing services; IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. Each cloud service model may have different advantages and disadvantages depending on your organization’s needs.
So, what is the best cloud migration strategy for your organization?
1: Plan
For many traditional enterprises that are planning to migrate to cloud environments, planning is their first phase of the cloud adoption journey.
At this stage, enterprises need to first create a blueprint and establish a working foundation for executing a successful cloud strategy, then use a cloud pilot to evaluate success.
2: Review
After planning the cloud migration strategy and instrumenting everything, detecting and troubleshooting potential issues that could occur before and during the migration is essential. Companies also need to validate the migration by measuring app performance and soliciting customer feedback.
The overarching goal of this phase is to accelerate migration and reduce risk.
3: Optimize
The cloud optimization phase is a process to analyze the allocation of cloud resources and right-size your environment to optimize costs.
This process ensures you receive maximum value from the cloud migration process and minimize cloud spend.
4: Modernize
Many of today’s legacy businesses need to evolve quickly to meet changing business needs and remain competitive.
Successful digital transformation depends on applications’ efficiency and productivity. Application modernization enables organizations to make smart, data-driven decisions and respond rapidly to market changes by utilizing modern technologies and processes.
5: Measure
The ultimate goal of cloud adoption is to accelerate innovation while delivering excellent customer experiences.
This requires continuous optimization and real-time analytics of applications and infrastructure.
Consider the 6 Rs for migrating to the cloud.
- Rehosting
- Re-platforming
- Repurchasing
- Refactoring
- Retiring
- Retaining
Why do cloud migrations fail?
Many companies take too long, overspend, or even fail because they aren’t sure how to deal with:
- Maintaining data quality and security during transfer
- Cloud migration costs
- Confidentiality
- Cloud compatibility
- Scalability
- Multi-cloud options
Cloud service providers:
They are companies that establish public clouds, manage private clouds, or offer on-demand cloud computing components (also known as cloud computing services) like Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service(SaaS). Cloud services can reduce business process costs when compared to on-premise IT.
These clouds aren’t usually deployed as a standalone infrastructure solution, but rather as part of a hybrid cloud.
How do cloud services work?
Like all other IT solutions, cloud services rely on hardware and software. However, unlike traditional hardware and software solutions, users don’t need anything other than a computer, network connection, and operating system to access cloud services.
Why use a cloud service provider?
- When your hardware and software are all on-premises, it’s up to you and your team to manage, update, and replace each component as needed.
- Cloud service providers allow you to allocate the management of one, several, or all of the parts of your infrastructure to a third party.
- Instead of buying and maintaining your own infrastructure, you access it as a service.
- Using a cloud service provider is a helpful way to access computing services that you would otherwise have to provide on your own, such as Infrastructure, Platforms, Software.
- Having infrastructure, platforms, or software managed for you can free your business to serve your clients, be more efficient in overall operations, and improve or expand your development operations (DevOps) strategy.
- Many public cloud service providers have a set of standard support contracts that include validating active software subscriptions, resolving issues, maintaining security, and deploying patches.
- Managed cloud service providers’ support could be relegated to simple cloud administration or it can serve the needs of an entire IT department.
There are thousands of cloud service providers all over the world. Here are some of the most popular:
- Alibaba Cloud
- AWS
- Google Cloud
- IBM Cloud
- Microsoft Azure
- Oracle Cloud
Many of the major cloud providers even give customers a preconfigured VPN as part of their subscription packages:
- Google Cloud offers Dedicated Interconnect.
- Amazon Web Services offers Direct Connect.
- Microsoft Azure offers ExpressRoute.
- OpenStack provides the OpenStack Public Cloud Passport.
