Cost savings, scalability, flexibility, increased productivity – these are universal benefits of moving to the public cloud. For some businesses, these advantages are even more acute. Any organization with one of the following business challenges would be better off with a cloud migration.
Seasonal business
Many organizations experience peak sales during a seasonal business cycle, and solve for this variability of demand through capacity planning – running extra servers on-premises to ensure stable connectivity and usability in peak seasons. However, for the rest of the time, they must pay for capital expenditures like maintenance and licensing while the infrastructure sits idle. And unexpected customer demand that exceeds current forecasting can lead to poor user experience due to insufficient capacity.
Cloud solutions allow companies to extend their workloads on-demand and pay for additional computing servers as they use them. Not only reducing maintenance wastes, the cloud also removes the uncertainty of wrong capacity prediction.
Satellite offices & remote users
It is difficult and expensive to maintain on-premises servers as a business grows regionally or hires remote workers. In most cases, off-site workers still experience latency and disrupted connectivity, which results in lower productivity and employee satisfaction.
Instead of adding extra infrastructure at large capital expenditures, companies can provide off-site offices with secure, remote access to cloud-based corporate data and applications. Instantly add or remove user access with a few clicks and pay only for what your users actually use.
Expensive IT infrastructure
On-premises infrastructure is expensive to manage, difficult to maintain, and potentially disruptive to upgrade. And a few years later, at the end of the server’s lifecycle, your clients will reluctantly pay for large capital expenses to repurchase and update new on-premises infrastructure.
Businesses with large IT capital expenditures can remove ongoing costs of maintaining and upgrading on-premises legacy systems through cloud solutions, turning the large IT capital outlay into predictable monthly operational expenses. All the heavy lifting of implementing, upgrading, and running the servers is then automatically taken care of by cloud experts.
Rigorous industry compliance
Many industries have to deal with an enormous amount of customer data and sensitive information on a daily basis – for example, healthcare, legal, and government. And as a result, are required to follow strict industry standards and compliance to safeguard customer confidentiality and privacy. This adds another layer of effort and expense on top of maintaining hardware and data centers.
Now, you can help simplify the management of IT infrastructure and data by moving their workloads and data to the cloud because cloud providers, like Microsoft Azure, are designed to meet these industry regulations.
Legacy applications
Many organizations have a difficult time running legacy applications, especially in the new era of mobile devices. You can either rewrite the applications to support mobile operating systems – which would potentially take weeks or even months, or simply deliver these legacy applications via the cloud.
Cloud hosting platforms such as MyCloudIT can automate the provisioning and management of legacy applications, allowing you to upload and share them on any device in minutes.
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These challenges face businesses of all sizes, but small and medium organizations are especially positioned to benefit from cloud computing. The public cloud allows SMB’s to access the breadth of resources that are usually reserved for enterprises with larger IT budgets.
How small businesses are thinking about the cloud >>
The cloud operates as a “pay-as-you-go” system, meaning that all companies have access to software and storage as they need it, without having to forecast capacity planning in the future. Companies can spend less hours wasted with IT troubles and more time and resources focused on the day-to-day running and development of their business.
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