Improve operational productivity by migrating to the Cloud

Cloud migration refers to the all the distributed activities undertaken by an organisation in the process of migrating all its digital assets — data, on-premise applications, IT resources, services, and all other kinds of business elements to a cloud environment in a crisp and speedy manner. It wouldn’t be remiss to call an organisation’s journey to cloud migration as a continuous reinvention, depending on what the organisation’s goal is. Cloud migration could refer to data, workload, organisational infrastructure and application transfer from local on-site data centres to the cloud, or from one cloud to another.

There are many advantages for organisation’s to opt for cloud migration. Primary among them are the low cost and ease of management, flexibility and rapid scalability. Cloud computing helps organisations achieve agility and speed, which in turn affects operational productivity. Here is a brief overview of some of the most important advantages of cloud migration:

Drastic reduction in IT dependence or complication

On the cloud, organisations pay only for the cloud capacity that they use, and don’t have to allocate big budgets to create, maintain, manage and support in-house IT teams. While on the one hand this reduces operational costs, it also improves their IT processes, especially in the case of small enterprises. The cloud service provider is tasked with the tedious challenges such as housing electronic hardware, keeping them running at all times, and securing them from cyber and security threats. Organisations can then hire lean IT departments that focus on serving business concerns instead of infrastructural upkeep.

Scalability and cost reduction

With the ability of paying for only the amount of cloud capacity that they use, organisations can upscale or downscale as per their requirements without any loss of time or financial cost. This is the obvious way in which cloud migration helps businesses reduce costs. In addition to this, some cloud services offer enterprises tools that enable automation, faster synchronisation of data, and securing data during the migration process. Some offer these tools not just during and in the initial phase of migration, but for a long time after it, depending on the user’s requirements. Other tools make it possible to compress and deduplicate data, reducing the storage space required, as well as the network bandwidth cost associated with the migration process. All of these can lead to significant savings for enterprises undertaking the journey.

Heightened security

When data is stored in a cloud environment, it can be accessed regardless of hardware issues and breakdown of the physical machinery, thus making it more secure, almost obliterating the threat of a complete loss of data. In addition to this most cloud service providers have robust in-built security mechanisms and provisions for automatic updation of data, making the security process more secure, practically unreachable, and resilient to threats. Some providers go one step ahead and provide the facility of creating low-cost snapshots of the data that require minimal storage space and have no impact on the performance of the application. These snapshots can be used to create backups of the original data, if the security of the application is gravely compromised.

Facilitation of remote collaboration

The ability of all teams within an organization, across geographies, to collaborate seamlessly is one of the biggest advantages for enterprises that run or hope to run operations around the world. Cloud migration of data makes such collaboration possible by providing communication tools, applications and software that can aid users to achieve collaboration. When business-critical documents and databases are made available to all team members in a secure cloud environment without time considerations, they are able to collaborate first more effectively and work together in real-time, even if they are situated in different geographies. Since cloud services offer automatic updations, it is also unlikely that employees in remote locations might inadvertently waste time creating work product from outdated and irrelevant information.