The benefits for going on Cloud
Information & Communications Technology and Media | 05 Feb 2020

Migrating to cloud certainly has many benefits. However, do note that cloud may not be for everyone at this point. Businesses will have to evaluate your needs and if cloud is applicable, and which deployment model to use. Questions which might be useful in deciding if cloud is a fit for your business include: “Will this improve customer service? Will it help my clients succeed? Will it better protect their data and/or my data?”.
The right fit also depends on where you are on your business journey. For many startups, going on cloud means cost saving. However, there might come a time when your business has grown and reached a threshold where managing your own servers may be less expensive and more effectual than putting everything on the cloud.
What is the benefit of my business going on to Cloud?
The fact that Gartner forecasts that public cloud revenue will grow by 17 percent in 2020, shows the growing interest in and adoption of cloud. We look at 5 benefits for businesses to go cloud native. See more of our slides HERE.
1) Flexibility
Organisations spend a significant amount of time and effort managing their infrastructure. The traditional division of labor between development teams and IT operations often means that there are too many decision points to allow for a real-time reaction to market forces.
Through cloud-native solutions, enterprises can flexibly and agilely move to DevOps by automating those decision points. IT operations time can be reduced by transforming decisions about provisioning, scaling, integration, regression testing, and zero-downtime deployment into automated tasks. This enables businesses to ship faster, boost innovation, and increase agility.
Cloud solutions also allow you to subscribe to useful modules and unsubscribe from others. With this flexibility, there is no need for software or hardware installation. This is one of the core reasons why many companies prefer cloud solutions for their business.
2) Security
Contrary to belief, cloud services might be more secure than if the SME were to maintain their own servers. Cloud solution providers are able to secure your data by allocating specific and significant resources to ensure physical, digital and human security, as well as build contingencies, which SMEs may be unable to because of scale and volume. Besides employing necessary, efficient and robust precautions to protect your data, cloud providers are also able to back up your data.
3) Cost optimisation
The costs of cloud computing are much more flexible than traditional methods. Companies only need to pay for services and capacity as and when it is needed. More capacity can be added for peak times and then de-provisioned when no longer needed. Traditional computing requires buying capacity enough for peak times, but it sits idle the rest of the time. Indirect cost savings also arise from the increased resilience, reduced downtime from redundancies, fault tolerance, and auto-recovery automated by cloud-native architectures.
4) Scalability
To stay ahead, businesses need to continually innovate and add features to established products and services without risking existing operations. As cloud-native architecture is based on loosely coupled microservices, companies can add or update new modules without having to rebuild or affect entire applications. Besides the scalability, this greatly reduces the operational and security risk of major failures.
5) Mobility
With the proliferation of Internet access, data and applications are available to employees, who can take their work anywhere via any device now. New resources can be easily added with customised access while allowing the entire team to access the latest versions of the business data. This is useful for teams that need to travel, e.g. the sales team. As they move around, they can use latest resources, collaterals, presentations as well as product demos.
Notes:
- https://deloitte.wsj.com/cio/2018/08/27/3-reasons-to-go-cloud-native/
- https://cloudacademy.com/blog/cloud-migration-benefits-risks/
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/larrymyler/2018/01/11/to-cloud-or-not-to-cloud/#7b116e99627c
- https://www.apogaeis.com/blog/6-reasons-for-small-medium-enterprises-smes-to-move-to-the-cloud-technology/