Companies spend large amounts of money developing and installing software to improve their operations.
Cloud computing enables your business to access software on the internet as a service. Cloud computing is also a safe way of storing and sharing data.
Is My Data Safe?
Data centers and mature infrastructures like Amazon Web Services (AWS) are designed with intense security best practices. Equipment is monitored, and access to the premises of data centers is heavily secured. The cloud is no less secure than servers managed internally by your company. In fact, there’s a very good chance that these cloud infrastructures are more secure. Very experienced staff maintain these infrastructures, processes are tight and there are many eyes on these systems at all times. There are tons for examples of real-world security best practices implemented by Salesforce, a popular cloud-based CRM.
Is Relinquishing Control A Problem?
A careful review of the cloud system you choose will result in not needing additional control. As long as the solution fulfills your goals, there’s no reason to pay for control you don’t need. In 2014, the CIA made a $600 million purchase with AWS, displaying its trust and understanding of the benefits of the cloud. The article goes on to mention that AWS has made similar deals with NASA, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Obama administration.
Potential Benefits of Cloud Migration
There are many problems that moving to the cloud can solve. Here are some typical scenarios that will benefit from cloud migration.
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- Your application is experiencing increased traffic and it’s becoming difficult to scale resources on the fly to meet the increasing demand.
- You need to reduce operational costs, while increasing the effectiveness of IT processes.
- Your clients require fast application implementation and deployment, and thus want to focus more on development while reducing infrastructure overhead.
- Your clients want to expand their business geographically, but you suspect that setting up a multi-region infrastructure – with all the associated maintenance, time, human, and error control effort – is going to be a challenge.
- It’s becoming more difficult and expensive to keep up with your growing storage needs.
- You’d like to build a widely distributed development team. Cloud computing environments allow remotely located employees to access applications and work via the Internet.
- You need to establish a disaster recovery system but setting it up for an entire data center could double the cost. It would also require a complex disaster recovery plan. Cloud disaster recovery systems can be implemented much more quickly and give you much better control over your resources.
- Tracking and upgrading underlying server software is a time consuming, yet essential process that requires periodic and sometimes immediate upgrades. In some cases, a cloud provider will take care of this automatically. Some cloud computing models similarly handle many administration tasks such as database backup, software upgrades, and periodic maintenance.
- Capex to Opex: Cloud computing shifts IT expenditure to a pay-as-you-go model, which is an attractive benefit, especially for startups