Cloud has become the new normal as companies of every size have realized the benefits of the cloud. For most organizations, the question isn’t “if” anymore; it’s “how fast can we move?” and “what are we moving first?”
There is more of a shift toward operating expenditure versus capital expenditure, or there is a stronger desire to reduce overhead and operational complexity. Cloud computing helps with these goals, and for many companies, moving to the cloud simply becomes the best infrastructure option.
According to Accenture, more than a third (36%) of organizations that have adopted the cloud have improved their time-to-market — a major driver — by using the cloud, and one-third (33%) are seeking app development skills that likely will help.
While calculating the ROI of a particular migration to the cloud will vary widely depending on a number of variables, major cloud providers have published studies that have reported significant business benefits.
For example, Amazon Web Services (AWS) commissioned IDC to interview 10 organizations from a cross-section of industries about their use of AWS for business-critical workloads and applications. According to the study, customers who switched from on-premise or hosted implementations to Amazon AWS cloud platform reported the following benefits over five years:
While results will vary, moving to the cloud is an important business and IT decision that can make up for the upfront and ongoing costs of migration.
There are three major cloud service types, covering the three major components of an IT system: the application (software), the operating system (platform), and the infrastructure.
Cloud providers can offer organizations any or all these components “as a service,” allowing organizations to shift the management of these platforms and lower operational costs, become more agile, and focus on their core competencies instead. Before you can plan a cloud migration, it’s important to understand cloud architecture and how it will affect your cloud computing needs.
After determining a cloud structure, you need to decide which cloud service provider has what you need.
Businesses often seek to find the best cloud solution to fit their unique organizational needs. A large part of this decision is selecting a cloud service provider. There are four primary cloud service providers that control the majority of global cloud resources. However, there are other lesser known cloud solutions that offer specific services to niche markets. The four most widely used cloud service providers all offer SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, and many other cloud services on a global scale.
According to Gartner, there are four major trends impacting cloud migration in 2020.
To overcome the challenges of this workforce shortage, enterprises looking to migrate workloads to the cloud should work with managed service providers and SIs that have a proven track record of successful migrations within the target industry. - Gartner
References: Gartner, 4 Trends Impacting Cloud Adoption in 2020; IDC, Quantifying the business value of Amazon Web Services Accenture, Enterprise Cloud Computing Unlocks Deep Strategic Value Through Increased Business Agility: High Adopters Reap More Benefits; CompTIA, What is Cloud Computing; A Beginner’s Guide to Cloud Types, Solutions and Vendors McKinsey, Creating Value with the Cloud CloudTech, If you’re planning a major move to the cloud – ask these 13 questions first