Cloud migration involves moving some or all of a company’s IT resources from a local network to a cloud provider or from one cloud provider to another. There can be many reasons for wanting to perform a migration, but overall it’s done to address a specific business need or improve IT operations. Here are some of the particular reasons why cloud migration is beneficial for a business:
Scalability: Cloud-based services are ideal for quickly scaling on demand. Most cloud provider services have auto-scaling capabilities, which means this can be done without the need for any human intervention and helps ensure the availability of resources to maintain business operations.
IT resiliency: Organizations of all sizes need a disaster recovery plan and business continuity built into their IT infrastructure. Moving your IT infrastructure to the cloud provides resiliency and continuity for your business. Cloud environments are designed to be incredibly resilient and offer 99.99% availability.
Lower Overhead: By hosting your IT infrastructure in the cloud, many things, such as purchasing hardware, managing security, software upgrades and patching, are handled for you.
This reduces your security risk, capital overhead and the time spent on maintenance activities.
Why do businesses migrate to the cloud?
The reasons a business migrates to the cloud is use case specific. However, several benefits of cloud migration apply to any business. Here are some of the most common cloud migration business cases:
Reduce costs: For some companies, hosting their services in the cloud can be cheaper than hosting and managing them locally.
Faster startup time: This is a big reason why cloud migrations are attractive for small businesses. It’s quicker for a startup or small business to create its scaleable IT infrastructure in the cloud than to build out its own local infrastructure.
Upgrade Legacy Systems: Some companies move to the cloud to upgrade their legacy systems and ensure they will stay current moving forward. Cloud providers handle hardware upgrades and maintenance, ensuring their infrastructure and applications remain supported.
Limitless compute, and storage space: Moving to the cloud enables a business to leverage nearly unlimited computing and storage capacity from a cloud provider without making any physical changes themselves.
What are the main benefits of migrating to the cloud?
Here are some of the key business benefits of cloud migration:
Scalability: Cloud computing can quickly scale up or down to match the required workload much better than the on-premises infrastructure.
Performance: One of the key benefits of cloud migration is improved performance and end-user experience. A cloud deployment can scale resources to meet demand or be deployed in geographic locations close to end-users, reducing network latency.
Cost Savings: Many cloud providers offer managed services that can help to lower your overall operational costs. The cloud provider will handle software patching, hardware upgrades and security and malware prevention.
Time Savings: Cloud providers handle many routine tasks, such as upgrading equipment, patch management, and IT security-related tasks. By migrating to the cloud, you can save your staff time and focus on other business priorities.
Flexibility: In the cloud, users can access resources from anywhere. This makes it easier for businesses to expand into new territories, offer services internationally, and efficiently support a remote working environment.
What are the types of cloud migration?
There are different migration options for an organization moving to the cloud. The best approach will depend on where they start their cloud migration journey and how much of their infrastructure they want or can move to a cloud environment.
Here are the main cloud migration options:
Re-host: In this migration, an application is moved from an on-premises host to a cloud service. Typically you start with the most straightforward applications to migrate, move them first and then move to more complex objects as the project progresses.
Re-Platform: This is when you modify an existing legacy system to work optimally in the cloud environment without rewriting its core architecture.
Re-Factor: In this approach, you rewrite one or more application elements. This is typically done to take advantage of some of the features in the new cloud environment.
Choosing a trusted cloud migration partner
CG Technologies offers cloud migration consulting services to help you decide if migrating some or all of your IT infrastructure will be best for you and your business. We work with you to understand your business and current infrastructure and can help manage your IT infrastructure migration to the cloud.
We understand the cloud, how to migrate to it, and how to get the most value for your business. In addition to offering cloud migration consultation services, we also provide a full suite of cloud-based managed services. Contact us to discuss your managed IT service needs.
