Understanding the motivators for cloud adoption

The cloud has numerous offerings that help many organizations run their workloads on the cloud. By enabling cloud adoption, companies can accelerate their business transformations and expansions. Operating on the cloud helps companies classify and find motivations to help evaluate the necessities of migrating to the cloud. Let’s look at some motivation-driven strategies that enterprises can expect as business outcomes upon performing cloud migration.

Resilience

The cloud’s infrastructure is built on virtual servers that are built to handle substantial computing power and data volume changes. This helps cloud consumers leverage and build their applications so that they run without interruption. The cloud offers durable, redundant, pre-configured, and distributed resources that can be accessed from a variety of devices, such as laptops, smartphones, PCs, and more. The sophistication of this infrastructure allows you to build heterogeneous and multi-layer architectures that can withstand failures that are caused by unanticipated configuration changes or natural disasters when they’re built right.

Having high levels of real-time monitoring and reporting capabilities in cloud environments to guarantee service-level agreements (SLAs) is nearly impossible for traditional data centers to build without substantial costs. This characteristic makes it easy for businesses to build robust and resilient applications with resource guarantees.

Service-level agreement (SLA)

An SLA is a measurement parameter (often expressed as a percentage) that defines a cloud service’s expected performance and often serves as an agreement between the cloud service provider and the cloud consumer.

Note that cloud resiliency still requires businesses to build their critical systems with the right design, architecture, monitoring, orchestration, reporting, and governance to continue to run the businesses in the event of a disruption. However, with the cloud’s underlying infrastructure, you can assess, evaluate, plan, implement, and manage your critical workloads and drive resiliency for your businesses as per your recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO).

What are RTO and RPO?

RTO is a business continuity metric that measures the amount of time a given application can stop working and the business can withstand the damage, as well as the time spent restoring the application and its data.

RPO is a business continuity metric that measures the amount of lost data within a given period that is impacting the business, from the point of a critical event to the previous backup.

Advanced security

Cloud offerings, when used the right way with the proper security controls, can bring increased security to cloud consumers. The cloud service providers architect their infrastructures according to security standards and best practices to provide secure computing environments. The security-specific tools that are offered by the cloud service providers use controls to build their data center and network architectures, which are designed for high security and tightly restrict access to your data.

Carbon footprint reduction

Cloud computing continues to play a key role in reducing global energy consumption rates. Cloud computing is becoming an increasingly popular option for replacing on-premises server rooms and closets, which often lack the operational practices to consume energy efficiently, causing environmental impacts. The cloud enables organizations to share resources globally, resulting in higher efficiency and resource utilization compared to small private organizations that depend on standalone data centers.

As environment and climate awareness grows around the world, cloud service providers (CSPs) are continuously embracing and building their core physical infrastructure assets, which feed off of renewable energy. As the consumption of renewable energy increases, the overall carbon intensity will steadily decrease, resulting in energy transitions that help with the global climate and clean energy challenges.

At the macro level, cloud data centers invest in newer, more efficient equipment to achieve extremely high virtualization ratios, which are less likely to occur for typical enterprise data centers. The equipment’s power consumption and cooling characteristics are an ever-evolving exercise that also helps reduce carbon emissions.

Improved optimization and efficiency

Cost savings is one of the key motivators for companies who are thinking of moving to the cloud. The setup and maintenance costs are usually reduced significantly by implementing cloud apps and their infrastructure. Surveys on cost savings and driving factors indicate that companies could save up to 50% on IT costs and cut down on the in-house equipment and the ongoing costs of maintaining IT departments with growing capacity needs.

Let’s discuss a few factors that can drive cost savings:

• Underlying hardware costs: You don’t need to invest in in-house equipment with cloud computing. This is a major cost cut for companies that don’t have to worry about investing in upfront expenses to acquire underlying hardware and build on-premises server rooms or data centers. You can maximize the real-estate and office space, which also cuts down on costs.
• IT operation costs: You don’t have to invest in employing any in-house staff to repair or replace equipment as this responsibility shifts from you to the cloud vendor when you migrate to the cloud. This is a major shift from capital expenditure to operational expenditure. You can free up your staff and focus on diversifying your workforce, who can work from anywhere with an internet connection.
• Hardware maintenance: Labor and maintenance costs are significant when it comes to building and maintaining an in-house data center. Ongoing upgrades or repairs are not your responsibility anymore, given that your data is stored offsite. This task will fall to the vendors, resulting in spending less time on installations from weeks or months to hours.

Moving to the cloud alone doesn’t help with maximizing cost savings. You have to establish a cadence or a routine of monitoring cloud spending with the available tools by shutting down idle resources or rightsizing resources to realize extreme cost savings.

Faster innovation and business agility

With cloud computing, companies can become more business-focused than IT-focused and drive programs where the benefits matter the most. Some of these benefits are as follows:

• Faster time to market: Cloud-native offers end-to-end automation platforms that enable you to release code into production any number of times per day. As a result, businesses can adopt and bring new business use cases to the market about 40% faster.
• Accelerates the innovation of business offerings: Many popular cloud service providers have hundreds of native services in domains such as networking, databases, compute, machine learning (ML), security, storage, artificial intelligence (AI), business analytics, and many more. These can serve almost any industry, especially automotive, advertising and marketing, consumer packaged goods, education, energy, financial services, game tech, government, healthcare, and life sciences. Cloud offers a wide range of options for you to build, deploy, and host any application and this empowers companies to innovate rapidly.

In this section, we looked at why many businesses are moving to the cloud. We learned about the various factors that help them reduce IT operation costs and increase their business agility. Next, we’ll learn about some of the leading cloud service providers and how their infrastructure is configured.