As a business owner, you’ve likely considered migrating to the cloud. If you’re unfamiliar with how it works, you’ve likely put it off for one reason or another. But putting it off is a mistake, there are five benefits cloud migration can provide for your business starting today.
Speed
Operationally speaking, getting a bare metal server up and running in a data center, going through a regular requisitioning process, then configuring and setting up a server that is identical to an existing server takes a lot of time in a non-virtual environment. You have to physically go through the process, have tangible items in your hands and take the time to configure the new server to function like the old one. In the cloud, all of that is code and configuration which can be automated with a button click or a command. Setting up a virtual server in the cloud is much faster than going through the process with a physical server in a data center. You can add and remove servers on demand to test out ideas. You add server for two hours, two minutes, two seconds, to determine if a new proof of concept will work or not and then scrap it moments later. This on demand instant start and stop approach saves time and money, leading into the next item of importance.
Cost
As stated in the above example, you can put up a server for 10 minutes that is massive and super powerful. Maybe you run it for four hours and realize that what you want to do won’t work on that giant type of server, so you shut it down. For those few hours, it might cost a few tens of dollars, as opposed to buying a physical server of that size. The server alone could cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, and then you have to hook it up to the network and do all of the prep and setup that normally comes with getting a new server. Don’t forget the labor costs of paying someone to configure the new server, too. Only you find out that it isn’t going to work the way you want it to, so now you’ve spent all of this money and have nothing to show for it. In the cloud, it costs far less for the server, it’s an on demand model, it takes less time to set it up and ultimately carries nearly zero labor costs.
Security
The cloud is secure by default. If you create a server, spin up a service, load a DB in the cloud and do nothing else almost all cloud services configured to be secure and when they are not, documentation is generally very specific about any security warnings. There are ways to configure services to be insecure. However, it is feasible, and in some cases easy, to put automation in place to make protections against misconfiguration at a breadth and depth not seen in other tech. In the cloud, everything is virtual. Infrastructure is code, which means that everything that’s going on can be logged and alerted. It can be audited, and reliable telemetry is available to help gauge whether events are normal or whether they are outliers and therefore suspicious.
It’s common, as business sprawl, to find old products and services in inventories they didn’t even know existed. A long gone employee started this server a long time ago, but it’s not clear what it is doing, it’s just sitting there and has been for years. In the cloud, there would be a large set of audit trails and logs to look through to figure out what this server was intended to do. In the cloud, you can rapidly figure out what what every system is doing.
Responsibility
This is one of the greatest benefits of the cloud. Using cloud services removes some of the responsibility from your business when/if something goes wrong. We subscribe to this model in many other facets of technology. For example, routers are typically purchased or rented from your ISP. If it breaks, you call them to fix it, you don’t fix it or replace it yourself. The same principle applies in the cloud. You are not solely responsible in the cloud, your responsibility is shared. As you place more of your operations and technology in the cloud, you start shedding more responsibility, leaving it up to experts to make sure your systems stay online, connected and serviced.
Cloud service providers guarantee security, patching and much of the maintenance and overhead related to up time and availability. In the shared responsibility model cloud service providers handle anywhere from 30% to 90% of the work related to a service for you, leaving you to focus on other things. This model translates to websites going down less frequently, less people getting hacked, etc. because you’re no longer relying on internal resources which have multiple standards and other focuses. You’re relying on dedicated experts whose sole job is to make sure your business runs smoothly and efficiently in the cloud.
Scalability and Availability
The way the cloud runs and operates is such that you can upscale and downscale rapidly or instantly. For example, if a business is expecting to get hammered with traffic because of a press blitz, the traditional model of preparation would be moving the site on a huge server that the business would have to buy. But when that traffic dies down, as it is expected to do, you then would have to manually migrate said website down to a smaller server. But you would still have this huge server that you either have to use for something else or sell because otherwise it’s just a lost cost. In the cloud you don’t have to do that. There are approaches that can be taken to deal with that problem so that the virtual server can scale on demand to meet the demand it’s currently receiving, and then it can shrink back down as soon as traffic reduces. This saves costs, maintenance, computing power and time.
The cloud is vastly more efficient than using physical servers in a physical data center. It’s faster, less expensive and more secure. There are abilities in the cloud that are not available in a traditional data center, and when you hand off some of the responsibility of maintenance to a cloud service provider, you alleviate some of your own responsibility. When it’s done right, migrating to the cloud will make your business more efficient, and saves you money along the way.