The days of the on-premises server are diminishing. A global pandemic has hit the global severely in recent months due to the global lockdown. The pandemic is not only a threat to mankind, but also to organizations of all sizes to sustain their business across industries. From local restaurant to multinational corporations, companies around the world have had forced to continue operations with their employees working remotely from home, allowing flexible work hours, and conduct online meetings to stay connected. Let us face the reality; there is no longer a status quo when it comes to moving to the cloud, cloud computing is now more crucial to the business than ever.
Although the demand for cloud computing has skyrocketed recently, many business leaders are still left wondering, what are the true benefits of the cloud? How exactly migrating to cloud bring benefits to their business? Here is a list of the major advantages a CEO can expect to achieve when adopting the cloud environment.
The Benefits of The Moving to Cloud
- Cost-Effectiveness
Achieve more with less. By adopting cloud computing, companies can reduce the size of their own data centers (or completely get rid of their data center footprint entirely). Fewer servers result in fewer resources being used. By reducing the number of physical servers, it will reduce the cost of purchasing hardware, software, managing, maintaining and upgrading of the physical servers which will significantly reduce the IT costs without impacting or affecting the organization’s day-to-day operation. Thus, using the cloud model converts capital expenditure to operational expenditure, making the cloud more convenient and efficient than physical servers. In addition, the pay per use model provided by cloud provides a flexible payment options to allow management to flexibly respond to business changes. With this, CEOs will be able to help the organization to achieve a high return of investment by moving into the cloud.
- No Mobility Barriers
Cloud is the gateway to mobility barrier that caused by the global pandemic. Organization can migrate their workload to the cloud to ensure the business can function as usual as cloud computing allows mobile access to corporate data via smartphones, laptop, or other mobile devices. Employees who are working remotely from home can take advantage of the mobility and flexibility of the cloud to stay engaged with clients and co-worker while working remotely from home to ensure business continuity. Through the cloud, you can offer conveniently accessible information to all employees be it the management team or the remote employees for better work-life balance.
- Better Security
CEOs often think that having their own physical data centre means that it is more secure compared to the cloud. Well, that is not necessarily the case. Cloud is a secure place to store your sensitive documents, vulnerable assets, and business-critical applications as the physical security of cloud data centres are guarded with military-grade 24/7 security.
Let’s take a look at Google Data Center Security (6 Layers Deep):
Apart from physical security, another major concern of CEOs is the security of its data stored in the cloud. Cloud providers understand that data breaches and other cybercrimes are devastating to the company’s branding, revenue and customer loyalty. Hence, cloud offers many advanced security solutions such as firewall, role-based permission control, internal network isolation, virus protection, and traffic throttling, that guarantee that data is securely stored, encrypted and isolates threats long before they reach the company’s server.
- Flexibility and Scalability
Organization can now easily increase or decrease the resources and services used based on the demand or workload at any given time. This is ideal for businesses with growing or fluctuating bandwidth demands. If your business demands increase, you can easily increase your cloud capacity without having to invest in physical infrastructure.
Scale your recourses up/down according to your business demand:
- CPU
- Memory
- Servers
- Storage
With the flexibility in expanding the computing resources enables your organization to escape from the large one-off payments of hardware and software and drastically minimize the IT costs. This allows your organization to have a competitive advantage over their competitors.
- Hassle-free Disaster Recovery
Disaster recovery protects the business from any unplanned disasters; be it power outages, equipment failures, cyber-attacks, or even natural disasters. Cloud-based disaster recovery provides quick and automate data recovery to regain your business access and functionality to IT infrastructure after all kinds of emergency scenarios with lower price and with less to zero hassle in managing the disaster recovery center. In simple teams, it is basically insurance for your data to prevent it from permanent data loss. This way, you no longer have to worry that you might permanently losing all your valuable data.
Conclusion: Good preparation is half the battle
Cloud has major advantages over an on-premises infrastructure, in terms of price, scalability, flexibility, and security. However, moving into the cloud requires good preparation. In order to drive the cloud transition into the right direction, a CEO needs to have a clear idea of the cloud strategy to be pursued and to have an understanding of the costs, finances, and responsibilities that are associated with the cloud solution.
Do you want to know more about the many possibilities and benefits of the cloud? In that case, you are in the right place at Cloudify.Asia. We are cloud professionals that provide the right cloud foundation and services for business growth through the managed cloud-native platform, consultancy, and subscription model. So, feel free to contact us for the customized cloud solution that perfectly matches your business objectives.
Written by Yen Chen (Customer Success Analyst)