Transitioning IT infrastructure to the cloud helps enhance operational productivity, agility, cost savings, and security.
Some workloads are ripe for the cloud, here are a few key considerations:
- Application lifetime: If an application is ready for a huge redevelopment, it is better to be migrated to the cloud to reduce budget and resources.
- Integration complexity: If an application does not have a complex interconnection with other applications or processes, then it’s easier and less costly to migrate to the cloud.
- Compliance and security: Some cloud providers provide built-in compliance for particular industries.
And here is a list of common workloads ready to move to the cloud now!
Email Services
Communication is one of the most important components of any business and it might require a lot of IT time and money to maintain. With cloud-based email systems, such as Office 365, your services are always up and running without the need for maintenance or updates. Enable your end-users to connect better with customers and colleagues whether they are working in the office or on the go.
Also, you can count on Microsoft Azure’s built-in security and compliance offerings to keep the data safe and meet the most rigorous industry standards, even in the government or healthcare industry.
Data Backup and Disaster Recovery
Before the cloud, if your servers went down or the power went out there was a good chance of data loss. The old-fashioned way to prevent this was replicating servers. This traditional method is expensive and requires extra resources and staff for maintenance and updates.
Moving data off-premises to a cloud provider is the best way to preserve your customer data against transient hardware failures. Microsoft Azure offers at least three copies of your data for data redundancy. There are also options to keep copies of your data in a secondary region in case of a natural disaster, such as Hurricane Sandy.
Along with backup, cloud service providers can also help with disaster recovery. For example, Azure Site Recovery continuously monitors service health and helps automate the orderly recovery of service in the event of a site outage at the primary data center.
Collaboration Tools
Collaboration tools drive most end-users’ day-to-day activities: instant messaging, web conferencing, file sharing, and project management. Many of these are still powered by on-premises servers, which is great for local users but often cumbersome for remote users.
Team collaboration services in the cloud, such as Microsoft Office SharePoint let employees access company information wherever they are. You can host a large instance in the public cloud near HQ, and have smaller instances running in other cloud regions that are near remote offices. Users will enjoy a native-feeling performance from anywhere and mitigate the day-to-day challenge of disconnection or lagging services.
Apps with large databases (CRM, ERP)
Applications such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) often consist of many VMs and huge databases containing terabytes worth of data. While much of the data stays idle most of the time, these applications and databases still require capacity planning to prepare for seasonal peaks.
There are two big benefits to getting these applications and their datasets into the cloud. First, you’ll greatly reduce your servers and storage costs to host and run the data. Secondly, these applications can benefit from the elasticity of the cloud by easily adding more computing power or storage during peak seasons.
If you are not ready to dive into the cloud, these specific workloads are great opportunities to begin your adoption of the cloud and become familiar with the technology and benefits. Greater profitability awaits as you move more and more to fully functional cloud workspaces that include email services, collaboration tools, data backup and disaster recovery, and applications of your choice.
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