Top 5 Reasons Why Companies are Moving to the Cloud

The term cloud refers to the software and services that run on the internet instead of locally on your on-site server or computer. Adopting the cloud has helped companies to find alternative plans to cut costs and ensure their data and systems are available to their customers anywhere and at any time.

Cloud technology is clearly showing its potential to different businesses and it continues to expand as well. With the availability of many cloud providers around the world such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google GCP, you can find different options to migrate from on-site servers to cloud servers.

A 2021 cloud adoption survey conducted by O’Reilly shows that Cloud adoption by companies has increased to 90%.

In this article, you are going to learn why some companies are moving to the cloud.

Let's get started.

There are several reasons why companies may plan to move to the cloud. you could accomplish these things without the cloud like you've been doing for years, but the cloud has introduced some new business capabilities through cost-effectiveness or accessibility.

1. Fault Tolerance

A very common reason companies first get interested into the cloud is fault tolerance. By definition, Fault tolerance is the ability of a system to continue operating without interruption when one or more of its components fail. Here system can be a computer, network, or cloud cluster.

If you're a company that values your existence, you'll have some disaster recovery plans. These plans usually involve some alternate place where you can store data or your systems if your primary data center has some sort of problem.

Traditionally, this was done by contracting with some provider to keep a physical second copy of your hardware, ready to go when your primary hardware has failed to operate.

The only problem is that when everything's up and running fine, that backup physical hardware is just sitting around collecting dust and becoming obsolete, but it will cost you more because you're still paying for it even if you don’t use it at that moment.

But what if there was a better way rather than buying all your backup equipment? Why not just rent it only when you need it? Cloud providers have massive amounts of the system capacity available to you in seconds, and you only have to pay for what you use, which is almost always a huge cost saving. Then when the crisis is over, you can just shut those things down and stop paying.

2. Cost Savings

Moving to cloud technology enables you to save both space and costs, previous you have to pay for on-site servers (sometimes even off-site data centers). With the cloud, you pay cloud providers to handle the data centers and other resources rather than hosting the servers in-house on your own. For example, Oracle Cloud customers save approximately 30% to 50% by switching to the cloud.

But if you misuse your cloud resources, they can easily cost dramatically more than any sort of on-site server. And this is why it's so important to train your staff and involve experienced cloud architects.

So cost savings can be realised, but you have to be careful about the expectations you set, especially in the early days.

3. Globalisation

This is another common reason for cloud adoption. As your business grows and expands beyond your home borders it makes sense to have resources and services close to those new markets that you want to reach, it can be for regulatory reasons or maybe performance reasons.

Cloud providers already have data centers and resources in various geographical locations available around the world, and you can use those with little more than a click of a button. This will definitely save you a lot of costs since you don’t have to create data centers on your own.

4. Agility

Another reason why companies move to the cloud is agility.In a simple definition, Agility is the ability to respond to changing needs.

In many companies, if you wanted to run an experiment that required IT equipment, you would likely have to endure a requisition and procurement process and secure resources from the IT group to set up and maintain that equipment. These steps could take weeks or months.

But by adopting cloud from different providers, you can get access to that equipment in a matter of minutes and you can try your experiment and then shut down the equipment.

Another advantage is that you can get your results in days instead of a month and the cost will be low compared to other ways.

5. Scalability

Another reason companies adopt the cloud is scalability. Scalability in cloud computing refers to the ability to increase or decrease IT resources as needed to meet changing business demands. Your goal is to have our capacity as close to your need as possible, but that's a pretty tricky thing to forecast.

The pay-as-you-go model of cloud providers enables you to have the flexibility and the ability to scale up or scale down depending on your business needs.

Final Thoughts

Cloud technology has a lot of benefits from both business and operation perspectives, in this article I have explained a few of them that can help you make a decision to adopt cloud technology in your company or even work on personal projects.

Besides its benefits to adopting cloud technology, there are still potential risks that you have to take into consideration. Some of these risks are 

• Migration can be time-consuming.
• Decrease in data control using a third party.
• Require more talents for management.
• Potential for existing data loss. 

In the next article, you will learn more about different clouds Migration approaches.

If you learned something new or enjoyed reading this article, please share it so that others can see it. Until then, see you in the next post!

You can also find me on Twitter @Davis_McDavid.

And you can read more articles like this here.

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