Currently, all growing businesses are dealing with transitions from on-premises infrastructures to multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, or both. From a strategic perspective, the decisions made referring to this significant technology shift will impact your company for the next decade.
Whether you are looking to move one workload or shutdown an entire data center, the transformation is complex and brings in many difficult decisions that influence key company processes. Successful cloud migration must rely on an in-depth analysis and high-level expertise.
In this review we answer some of the most important questions that our clients have asked during their cloud journey.
The Business Value of Cloud Transformations
Profitability
Cloud computing is based on the payment-for-usage model. The model brings tangible benefits. There are no upfront costs of the hardware, no need to procure hardware or worry about staffing the maintenance teams. Most importantly, there is no need for a long-term cost commitment – you can discontinue the service and eliminate the associated costs within a short period of time.
The additional benefit with cloud is the ability to temporarily or permanently increase the required resources and pay only for the time these additional resources are used.
Many companies are also taking the advantage of categorizing the costs as CapEx, as opposed to OpEx costs involved with traditional infrastructure. The downside of the pricing model is the increased difficulty to accurately predict the annual spend. Financial outlook can be prepared based on the historical usage and prices, but it is subject to potential future peaks that are not always predictable.
Elasticity
When the workload is changing, depending on an increase or decrease of processing demands; the process of adding resources or removing them, can be automatized based on the actual system needs. Cloud services can for example add extra resources to handle increased network traffic in your e-commerce shop that is incrementing for a specific period of time (for example during the night, after unexpected online news about your services) and then remove those extra resources when the network traffic decreases. This prevents the application from going dark at the network traffic peak and saves sales opportunities for the e-commerce shop.
Pay for what you really use and for the time when it is necessary. Usually compute engines work only when the workloads are being processed. This means that not all services need to work 24/7. Huge amounts of money can be saved when the clusters, which are not used, can be turned off.
