You cannot read or listen to anything about the IT landscape without hearing about cloud computing. Whether you’re looking at MIDaaS, CIAM, or software-as-a-service, there are cloud computing options for just about everyone.
The benefits of turning to cloud computing over in-house IT models are clear. Cloud computing offers scalability, affordability, and flexibility. However, there are some questions your organization may want to consider when determining if cloud computing is right for your business.
What Is Your Company’s Projected Growth?
Cloud computing was designed to give businesses the cloud storage they need when they need it. If your business is growing rapidly and you need to quickly add resources, cloud computing is the best way to do it. This is especially true if you are growing faster than expected and are finding yourself in desperate need of new resources quickly. Even if you are not growing now but hope to grow in the future, migrating to the cloud can put you in a position to respond quickly to growth.
Do You Want to Save Money?
IT budgets usually represent a large percentage of an organization’s operating expenses. If you do all of your data storage in-house, this means that you are spending money on equipment, staffing, and software.
When something breaks, you are repairing or replacing it. Your IT budget could be at six figures before you know it. Cloud services can drastically lower your operating costs. They allow you to spend less while maintaining or improving the quality of your data storage.
You may think that because your operating costs are not an issue today, there is no reason to consider switching to the cloud. However, the reality is that since everything is moving to the cloud, failure to migrate your company’s operations to the cloud will eventually lead to increased expenses.
Does Your Organization Need to Meet Compliance or Regulatory Requirements?
If your organization is in a highly regulated industry, you likely have to follow specific sensitive data and security standards. It could be time-consuming and expensive to update your in-house hardware and software to meet these regulatory requirements.
Most private cloud and hybrid cloud infrastructures have already been designed to meet or exceed the regulatory requirements for banking, the life sciences field, and data storage. All it takes is one data breach for your organization’s reputation to be permanently ruined. When you are paying out hundreds of thousands of dollars in regulatory fines, lawsuits, and compensation, you may wish that you had decided to migrate your data storage to the cloud earlier.
Save Money While Improving Stability
All things being equal, your organization is concerned about cost optimization. If you decide to migrate to the cloud, then the concern is cloud cost optimization. This is often found via setups like an AWS spot instance.
Spot instances can save you up to 90 percent on your cloud storage. Since you are bidding on computing resources, the downside is that you have no idea how long those capacities will stay available. Interruptions are going to happen. That is why spot instances can save you money but should not be used for workloads that are unable to tolerate them or for critical workloads.
For all their benefits, another challenge is that spot instances provide limited capacity. Spot instances represent a supply and demand market. The amount of available capacity sold as spot instances will change based on the time of day, its size, the region, and other factors. You may have to deal with unexpected behavior if you pick a popular spot instance during a huge surge, like Black Friday.
Why use them at all? If you plan things correctly, you can get access to quality computing resources at a fraction of the cost. By knowing when to replace the capacity before it becomes an issue, your users will not be affected. However, it is not the best option for everyone.
Conclusion
Cloud computing used to be referred to as the thing of the future. Now, it is here to stay. Organizations that choose not to migrate to the cloud are putting themselves at risk of falling behind the times. Cloud computing is cost-effective, flexible, and secure, making it a great option for most organizations.
