Businesses are often puzzled by the thought of moving to the cloud. They are concerned with data loss, privacy risks, susceptibility to external attack, internet connectivity etc. But do these concerns outweigh the cloud benefits? Or, are you afraid of the change?
Comparing the Leading Cloud Providers
Before jumping into the debate lets compare the leading cloud providers on the basis of the two most critical factors- downtime and cost of migrating.
Let’s say you are a growing company with 5,000 site visitors per day and requires a RAM of 8GB and memory of 500GB with 8 core processor. The following image represents the basic comparison between the leading five cloud providers for this scenario.
Google’s cloud platform should be the ideal choice for this scenario with the downtime of only 4.46 hours for the year 2014 and costing $805 per year. Similarly, the image compares Amazon Web Services(AWS) (2.41 hours), IBM SmartCloud (8.76 hours) and Rackspace (7.52 hour). Microsoft Azure losses out on downtime (39.77 hours) but costs $1,880 per year less than IBM SmartCloud ($2,172 per year) and Rackspace ($2,521 per year).
5 Reasons Why Cloud Benefits Your Business
1. Cost Efficient
Moving to the cloud saves the upfront cost of purchasing, managing and upgrading the IT systems. Thus using cloud model converts capital expenditure to operational expenditure. Using one-time-payment, ‘pay as you go’ model and other customized packages, organizations can significantly lower their IT costs.
2. Storage space
Businesses will no longer require file storage, data backup and software programs which take up most of the space as most of the data would be stored in remote cloud servers. Not only cloud frees in-house space but also provides unlimited space in the cloud.
3. Fault Resilient
While using own servers, you need to buy more hardware than you need in case of failure. In extreme cases, you need to duplicate everything. Moving to cloud eliminates redundancy and susceptibility to outages. Thus migrating to cloud not only adds reliability to the systems but also keeps information highly available.
4. Scalability
Using cloud computing, businesses can easily expand existing computing resources. For start-ups and growing enterprises, being able to optimize resources from the cloud enables them to escape the large one-off payments of hardware and software, making operational costs minimal.
5. Lean Management
With cloud, businesses can perform their processes more efficiently. Cloud migration leads existing workforce to focus on their core task of monitoring the infrastructure and improving them. Thus cloud computing leads to lean management and drives profitability.
How can Cloud Consultants help you?
Migration to cloud computing platforms requires essential IT changes and sound knowledge of latest technology. The decision makers should visualize the migration as a business re-engineering process rather than an architectural change. With plethora of options available, business leaders are often confused about which cloud computing technology suits their needs. At this point cloud consultant can help them to choose the service that will empower their current processes.
A cloud consultant should the ask the following critical questions to help you define requirements.
- Do you care where you data is stored and how secure it is?
- Are your business processes well defined and are they efficient?
- How much downtime and delay can your business handle?
Knowing these questions will help the consultant find the best services for your business. Thus a consultant should present governance models, security models, performance models, process models and data models in addition to basic infrastructure.
Cloud has certainly changed the dynamics of IT industry. AWS and Microsoft remain the largest cloud providers inclusive of all services. But at the same time cloud consultants play a huge role in empowering the businesses to incorporate innovative solutions and market the cloud-based changes to suit the customers’ needs.
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