The following 10 good reasons better illustrate the true advantages of migrating to the cloud:
1. Switching from capex to opex
Cloud computing services are traditionally charged on a monthly basis (opex), which allows even very small businesses to avoid upfront investments (capex) for their own IT infrastructure and gives them the capability to grow flexibly and quickly (Pay-as-you-grow).
Purchasing an on-premises IT infrastructure most likely ends up in a conflict between means and needs.
While your infrastructure (hardware setup) and the provided resources remain static for the complete usage/investment lifecycle, a business’s requirements to IT are constantly evolving – be it due to increasing demands of applications and users, to the growth of the company or to a necessary downsize because of e.g. declining sales.
Whereas growth could be covered by additional investments with the challenge of a possible vendor lock or compatibility issues, you will end up stuck when downsizing with huge values of sunk capital, as you won’t get a return on your initial investment in infrastructure.
Opposed to this, a cloud environment can be adapted to your actual demands in real time – services and resources can be easily cancelled or scaled according to the changing situation. Your liquidity is minimally impacted and as a result, you gain financial flexibility as well.
2. Optimized resource fitting
Idle servers and resources mean unnecessary expenses. On a static infrastructure the configuration has to cover peak times – this comes automatically with unused capacities at non-peak times.
Cloud computing can prevent you from paying for these expendable by balancing costs through scalability on a mutualized server infrastructure – you only pay what you use.
3. Human resource allocation
IT staff members often spend a great portion of time on monitoring, user support and maintenance of hardware and backups.
Shifting those responsibilities to a Cloud Service Provider frees up their precious and often expensive time to make them focus on higher-value-added tasks to make your business thrive.
4. Efficiency Savings and Environment
One KPI for Cloud Service Providers is efficiency. By cumulating customers on their shared infrastructure, they are able to better use it to its capacity than you in your on-premises data center.
They in turn are measured by the data center provider at their power efficiency and cooling efforts while operating to official environmental standards.
Du to this, they work hard to design everything in the most efficient manner and optimize their usage of energy in order to lower consumption and therewith their carbon footprint. You as the customer benefit from their efficiency by lower costs for energy – which is, of course, included pro rata in your monthly subscription.
5. Not only ONE cloud for everybody
“Cloud” itself is a generic term with various definitions, why there is not the one and only right cloud to choose – it depends on your personal situation.
Beyond the question of price, your knowledge, your human capital and your personal preferences, you might want to put non-sensitive data to a Public Cloud while mission-critical assets should be hosted in a Private Cloud.
Often or even temporarily a hybrid scenario including your existing infrastructure might be the silver bullet.
6. A strategy for backup and Disaster Recovery
Even if you decide to stay with a traditional IT setup, a cloud strategy for backup and Disaster Recovery can improve availability and resiliency by reducing RPO and RTO in combination with huge savings in time and costs.
It can ensure Business Continuity and make the difference in the case of cases.
7. Elastic Resources
Also known as “elastic computing”, your Cloud Services will grow as your demand grows.
This eliminates your constraints and gives you the flexibility to scale according to your needs – in any direction, up AND down, while you always just pay-as-you-use.
8. Enforcing collaboration
Globalization, flexible working hours, working in the field… There are various reasons for the demand for communication and collaboration, sharing data internally and externally or working remotely at any time and any place.
A Cloud workspace and its tools can simplify all these challenges by providing an always on work-resource accessible from anywhere. Combined with software as a service it can leverage your productivity and empower your business.
9. Prevent data loss
Most security lapses start at your own employees and a data loss can hurt your business dramatically.
Dissociating the data from your physical devices on-premises makes the information accessible even when you have a hardware outage and regardless the respective “Access-Device”.
10. Focus your core business
Moving to cloud allows you to increase financial and operational efficiency as well as your productivity and enables your business by providing tools which were normally unaffordable.
Cloud Service Providers are democratizing enterprise-class IT assets by cumulating customers and needs in order to make these assets accessible even for SME’s and VSE’s.
They get access to a huge range of resources which accommodate growth and let them focus on their core business, as IT is most likely just a derivative demand.
At CMD.solutions, we create adapted solutions, according to the evolution of companies and their activities taking into account new technologies. That is how our services portfolio is constantly expanding, adapting to our customers’ needs.
About:
Wagner ICT, an integral part of the GROUP Wagner, merges the strengths and expertise of its European Data Hub and CMD. solutions’ subsidiaries including MIXvoip’s business telephony solutions.