Knowing the factors behind your competitors’ moves to the cloud can help clarify your own decision about whether it’s right for your organization.
To handle data needs on site, organizations must purchase hardware, accommodate servers with adequate space and cooling, complete connections, and install software. They need to engage personnel to oversee, maintain, and troubleshoot operations. Smaller organizations may face challenges with required upfront costs that impact their cash flow.
Larger enterprises can more easily absorb these costs, especially when they calculate cost per year throughout a system’s lifecycle. Even so, when Emirates moved from on-site infrastructure to the cloud to reduce costs and better respond to demand fluctuations, it estimated savings would top $1 million annually.
Maintenance and upgrades for on-prem systems carry cost to both the organization’s bottom line and productivity. A mechanical failure or physical disaster can put the company out of commission for long stretches while skilled technicians outside the organization remedy the problem.
When companies opt to move all their data needs to the cloud, there’s no large initial investment required. Upgrades happen automatically and seamlessly; data backups are ensured and redundancies built in to eliminate downtime in the event of virtual or physical disaster.
Unlike on-site infrastructure where organizations either invest more capital for increased resources or lose money when their capacity exceeds workloads, migrating to the cloud gives them infinitely more flexibility. With a cloud deployment, organizations can add or reduce storage capacity and computing power as their needs and requirements change, even if that’s frequently. Most providers offer pay-as-you-use pricing, so organizations pay only for what they need.
Cloud migration offers other benefits including increased security, greater reliability, faster implementation times, and high availability.
