The cloud is a model for computing services that is designed to be flexible, scalable, reliable, and available. In the traditional world, organizations would buy a physical server or virtual machine, configure it with applications, and run them on the server or virtual machine. This was very labour-intensive, and also required a certain amount of skill to set up and maintain. When you move to the cloud, you don’t buy a physical server or virtual machine, instead you buy a service from a cloud provider such as Managed IT Service San Diego.
Migrating to the cloud can feel overwhelming. There are stability concerns, cost concerns, and most importantly security concerns. For many people, a successful cloud migration reduces cost, improves scalability, and significantly reduces the risk of a cyber-incident that could derail your business. The best strategy for any cloud migration is to understand what cloud migration is, how it can benefit your business, and what is involved in making it happen.
As you prepare to move applications and data to the cloud, you need to look at each service carefully to make sure it’s right for your business. In order to ensure you get the most out of the cloud once migrated, you need to know that you are getting as many of the advantages of the cloud as possible.
What is Cloud Migration?
Cloud migration is the process of moving a company’s digital assets, services, databases, IT resources, and applications either partially, or wholly, into the cloud. Cloud migration is also about moving from one cloud to another.
If your company is looking to move on from outdated and increasingly inefficient legacy infrastructures such as aging servers or potentially unreliable firewall appliances, or if you want to abandon hardware or software solutions that are no longer working at optimum capacity, then you should migrate to the cloud. This is why so many organizations are at the very least, making a partial migration to the cloud.
However, if you are considering moving to the cloud for your business but you don’t know where to start or how to go about it, here are some of the best ways to start moving to the cloud. The first step in any cloud migration is to determine whether it makes sense for you. If you’re looking for the cheapest way to move to the cloud, consider the free alternatives that are available.
What are the Benefits of Cloud Migration?
Here are a few benefits your cloud service or services should provide to ensure that your cloud migration is quick, smooth, and gives you the major advantages of moving into the cloud.
Scalability
It is much easier to grow and to improve the quality of your work when using cloud-based solutions. To start, you’ll need to check to make sure that you have your own cloud provider set up that is running effectively. Secondly, it is then your cloud provider’s business to prepare their infrastructure for your growth. What’s even better is that your cloud can adjust the level of assets needed for the amount of traffic you’re exposed to. In other words, clouds make it possible that scalability happens instantly.
Switching to the cloud means your company has an improved ability to scale up or down based on your IT needs and business plan. An IT solution that was ideal for one year may be obsolete a few years later, making it difficult for companies to adapt to shifting customer demands. With cloud migration, organizations have the ability to dramatically reshape their infrastructure and workloads to accommodate the needs of today without being chained to the equipment and assets that made sense in the past. The cloud gives you the power to control your resources based on your own individual and business needs.
Cloud migrations allow your business to grow and expand painlessly while you work within the existing infrastructure. This means applications and data can grow without impacting your business performance or customer experience. For many companies, this is the most important benefit of cloud migration.
Enhanced Security Features
Most cloud providers take care of some of the tougher security issues, such as keeping unwanted traffic outside a specific scope from accessing the machines on which your data and apps reside and ensuring automatic security updates are applied to their systems to keep from being vulnerable to the latest known security threats.
Keep in mind, though, that you will still need to have security policies in place on your end, such as keeping mobile devices secure, making sure employees don’t divulge passwords or other sensitive information to unauthorized parties, and so on.
Integration
Moving your business to the cloud can enable your business to operate more efficiently, and connect systems together. 59% of SMBs report increased productivity from the cloud according to a survey from software company Frevvo. Traditionally, a business that uses a data center has to perform a regular infrastructure refresh, which means that it has to replace hardware and software components in order to make sure they are working properly. This is a costly, time-consuming, and ever repetitive task that eats up valuable time and resources. Today, businesses can easily migrate applications to the cloud at the end of a hardware refresh cycle. In the cloud, hardware and software updates are completed by the cloud provider, saving money, and time, and ensuring applications are always supported by the most up-to-date infrastructure. This means your new cloud environment can grow and expand to meet your business needs while enabling your team to do more than ever before. Your cloud provider can also manage the complexity of your infrastructure so you can focus on what matters most. The simplicity and ease of the cloud remote access mean that your team can focus on working hard and growing your business.
Disaster recovery and automatic backup
It helps you make sure that nothing vanishes in case of any breakdown. Clouds are almost data-loss resistant because they store copies of data in multiple locations.
Conclusion
These benefits of Cloud Migration are very helpful as it involves more than just moving data from one place to another and re-installation of your software. Moreover, it is a way to transform your company and make it more Agile.
Post courtesy: Steven Truong, Marketing Coordinator at I.T. Responsive.
