What is Driving Large Businesses to Turn to Cloud?

Since the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, all the big enterprises worldwide have seen a change in how their businesses will work in the future. The ‘Work from Anywhere’ is thriving worldwide; so is the adoption of cloud technology among large companies.

 
Most companies have identified the importance of embracing the ‘Cloud First’ strategy. However, many large businesses still needed to be more willing to achieve successful outcomes across their journey toward complete cloud migration.

Cloud computing has gone from a cutting-edge technology to a well-established best practice for businesses of all sizes and industries. According to Flexera’s 2020 State of the Cloud Report, 98 percent of organizations now use at least one public or private Cloud.

Primarily, the heavy dependence on legacy applications and on-premise IT systems hinders them from beginning their cloud migration efforts. Despite learning about the benefits of cloud technology, businesses find it more convenient to stick to their traditional systems.

They also perceive that migrating vast amounts of their business data to the Cloud is a cumbersome process that takes forever. Their biggest fear is how the process will impact the productivity of their business.

While all these concerns are genuine, business leaders today are also beginning to uncover the overall impact of cloud migration on business value. Migrating workloads from legacy systems to cloud applications can have far-reaching benefits that justify the effort to transform businesses digitally over the Cloud.

Here is how beginning cloud migration can make large enterprises resilient in the coming years:

Attaining Superior Data Security

Large-scale enterprises have tons of data they are constantly managing, processing, and analyzing as a part of their business operations. With cyber-attacks becoming increasingly sophisticated today, ensuring that this sensitive data is secure and safe remains the top priority for IT teams.

This is also among the main reasons why most big businesses are reluctant to move away from legacy applications and on-premise systems.

However, cloud service providers commonly deploy teams of security experts to monitor and mitigate cybersecurity risks constantly. Physical hardware products risk data theft when a particular device goes missing.

On the contrary, moving data to the Cloud gives IT teams an option to clear out sensitive data or even all the information on devices or systems where access is compromised.

Eliminating On-Premise Direct and Indirect Costs

For most organizations, the cost of maintaining an on-premise data center is increasing with the rising amount of data each year. Migrating to the cloud lowers costs with a flexible, pay-as-you-go option that allows your organization to pay for only the resources utilized without making any long-term commitments. If an application requires more CPUs, you can easily spin up a new server with the desired specifications in a couple of minutes instead of spending countless hours researching, reviewing budgets, getting approval, and so forth.

There are direct and indirect costs associated with on-premise infrastructure. Decision-makers must work closely with the accounting and purchasing departments to collect receipts and purchase orders for hardware, software, storage, and license costs, security tools like antivirus, user support expenses warranties, and off-site system backup costs.

There are a variety of other expenses associated with an on-premise environment considered indirect expenses. These expenses are often referred to as “hidden” because they are often overlooked rather than “hidden.” These vary depending on company requirements and might include the following:

• The real estate of the storage space used for the servers
• Tools used for temperature control in the data center
• The cost of setup, configuration, and ongoing upgrades
• Staff salaries for administrators that maintain an on-premise data center
• Networking infrastructure setup and ongoing maintenance
• The cost of downtime while the team troubleshoots the issue
• Depreciation of the hardware and software

 
A typical response from customers to the enhanced benefits is, “Sounds ideal. Must be expensive.” That’s a common misconception associated with the costs of running your application in the cloud.

Modernizing Data Across Operations

Data plays a huge role for big corporations in planning their business strategies and for better decision-making. Executives rank data-based reporting higher than anything today. Thereby, the need for analyzing real-time data and deriving valuable insights through data has become more intense today than ever.

Modernization of data in terms of predicting future business trends has become a common practice for large businesses. Migrating business data to the Cloud can enable companies to implement data analytics more effectively and modernize data management mechanisms to support their IT efforts. It is an essential factor driving large-scale enterprises to kickstart their cloud migration journey.

Accessing and Doing Business Digitally

As large businesses continue to expand their operations across business units, different locations, and even in various subsidiaries, they require a system that can enable accessing information and data digitally.

Flexible data accessibility is one of the most significant benefits of migrating Cloud today. Especially in the world of ‘Work from Home’ where remote working culture is thriving, big corporates are outgrowing their physical data infrastructures. Cloud computing is emerging as an option that surpasses legacy applications and hardware-based systems in terms of data flexibility and accessibility for businesses that are growing digitally.

Migrating to the Cloud can give businesses the liberty not to be restricted to a location and physical company hardware. It also enables teams at different locations to collaborate more effectively through the Cloud.

Upscaling Business Operations Conveniently

Big companies are constantly looking for ways to expand business operations and networks across various verticals and locations. Traditionally, many large businesses have on-premise application systems that they implement across all their units.

However, upgrading its on-premise, legacy systems periodically becomes an expensive affair. It also becomes time-consuming to set up physical infrastructures every time a business unit undergoes upscaling.

When companies migrate their operations to the Cloud, they can scale through the organization more efficiently. Pay-as-you-go models of cloud computing are among the most suitable options for large businesses to keep abreast of changes in the organization cost-effectively.

Making IT Infrastructures Cost-Effective

Besides its security and scalability benefits, cloud adoption is also driven by its cost-effectiveness when managing massive IT infrastructures in big companies. As mentioned earlier, pay-per-usage models continue to remain attractive to end users. At the same time, the wide range of solutions and variants in cloud applications also enable large businesses to transform their IT infrastructures digitally.

Contrary to this, having a data center and dedicated IT for a large business can eat a big chunk of their budgets. Migrating to the Cloud can enable them to securely store their data off-site and utilize their IT teams more efficiently.

Should Your Business Begin the Journey Towards Cloud?

All these factors are among the top driving forces pushing large businesses to aspire for successful cloud migration. CIOs and CTOs of many big corporations aim to achieve maximum benefits by digitalizing their IT efforts across all business units and subsidiaries.

If you are aiming to initiate your cloud migration journey, you must consider the cloud maturity of your company and the organization’s culture and priorities. The strategy of your cloud transformation depends on your starting point. Since the roadmap for cloud transformation is not one-size-fits-all, it is essential to plan your organization’s cloud journey carefully.

From cloud-native to completely on-prem but thinking about the Cloud, Datavail helps clients map and execute their journey to the Cloud and then help manage their systems in the new environment. Download our case study “Kuwait-Based Cement Giant Implemented Cloud Transformation Across All Its Subsidiaries” to explore how we help a significant Kuwait based cement manufacturer accelerate cloud adoption.

Our team of experienced experts helps our clients to identify their position on the cloud maturity models and design an effective cloud transformation strategy for them. Click here to contact our executives and find out how you can successfully optimize your workload migration to the Cloud with minimum effort and maximum benefits.