Moving your business from on premise to cloud is a tough decision. On the one hand, there are a lot of new opportunities - think of all these services just waiting for you to use, in the connection with unbelievable compute power. On the other hand - change always means challenges and uncertainty. Having doubts about new things is natural. Please let us summarize and challenge 5 of the most common concerns related to moving into the cloud - because you are not the only one experiencing them.
When running your organization you have 2 main categories of expenditures - capital expenditures (CapEx) and operating expenditures (OpEx). In general CapEx are purchases which you finance once and use in the long term - and are usually very high investments. Just imagine how much does it cost to build your data center from scratch - buy the servers and all additional equipment and software for your infrastructure. And it needs to be placed somewhere of course. OpEx is something you need to pay for your day to day operations - like the rent, salaries, taxes and electric bills. When you go to the cloud you don’t need to worry about the CapEx at all - you don’t need to care about the infrastructure, power, cooling, hardware upgrades. You pay for what you really need and use - and it’s fully dynamic, so if you need more compute power for one day in the month - you just need to scale your resources accordingly. You don’t need to pay for the upgrade of the hardware not really used for the 29 days in the month. According to the International Data Corporation, almost every organization that uses cloud services saves money. Of course it doesn’t come automatically, your cloud setup must be designed according to what you really need. The transition itself also costs - but in the longer term you can save a lot.
When you work with data, security is probably one of your biggest concerns. You spend a lot of time and money to implement security policies, you hire specialists taking care of all the potential vulnerabilities of your systems. Now think of the big Cloud Solution Provider, providing services inter alia to the governments, financial, insurance and medical companies. Investing billions in security. Hiring hundreds of experts specialized in security. Having data encryption at transit and at rest and data masking mechanisms built into their solutions. Having strict data access policies. Having built-in backup plans and redundancy options. Most probably security in the cloud will be tighter than in your current system. Gartner predicts that, through 2025, 99 percent of cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault, not the security provider’s. So as long as you implement your solutions in a secure way the cloud security shouldn’t be your concern at all.
When moving into the cloud you will lose your control over your physical server, your infrastructure, software updates and so on. And guess what - taking into account what you know from the security section, this is exactly what you want. Without the need of doing all the maintenance jobs you can fully focus on developing solutions which bring real value for your clients. And how much time did it take to implement your backup strategy? How much time do you need to maintain it? Is it actually reliable? That’s a big topic. So - you still have full control over your data and applications. You have all resources needed to do the important stuff - leave all the dirty work to your cloud provider.
Having your data in a public cloud may raise concerns about data compliance. You have confidential data about your customers, maybe you even process financial and healthcare data. But actually the Cloud Solution Provider will ensure that you are compliant. Doesn’t matter how specific your industry is, cloud providers will handle your needs and will make sure you are up to date with compliance requirements. Again, cloud providers could do the dirty job for you giving you tools like compliance policy checks, data encryption and access control. You can even think about having a hybrid cloud in place if you are obliged to store some of your data only locally.
“There are a lot of different resources and services available. The cloud is too complex and I have a feeling I’m just too small to go into the cloud”. Indeed, the range of possibilities in the cloud is really wide. It’s very important to think of your migration strategy and take the approach that suits you the best. For example, you can go on the easy path and just lift and shift your current solutions. Will be fast but probably you will not be able to get most of the cloud advantages. Or you can go in the opposite direction and refactor your solutions entirely for the cloud. Or do whatever you want in between. In fact the wide range of possibilities doesn’t mean that cloud solutions must be complicated - cloud vendors give you a lot of tools which make things simple. Graphical interfaces, wizards, automation, dashboards, DataOps tools… Everything to let you work more effectively.
As you see, transitioning into the cloud is not as scary as it looks at the first glance. And know what - you are not alone. If you need assistance from skilled cloud professionals (you probably would at some point) just reach out to us - we’re glad to help!
Thanks for reading!
Hope you enjoy it and if you'd like to talk more about it, please reach out to me via email: mariusz@faro.team
References:
[2] https://www.arcserve.com/blog/8-top-myths-and-realities-cloud-computing
[3] https://www.onixnet.com/insights/cloud-computing-myths
[4] https://www.iitr.us/publications/data-privacy-in-the-cloud-a-dozen-myths-and-facts
[5] https://accesspay.com/knowledge-hub/automation/15-myths-cloud-technology/
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