Ditch Your Physical IT Infrastructure: Benefits of Moving to the Cloud
Wondering about whether moving your business’s data and IT infrastructure to the cloud is a smart move?
For most of our clients, cloud migration is a sound strategy with numerous benefits. But it can seem like a daunting transition: It feels as if you’re giving up control of your data, and maybe the status quo has been working OK for you thus far.
If you’re on the fence about transitioning to the cloud, the following benefits should help ease your concerns:
Increase Reliability With the Cloud
For almost every single business on Earth, moving digital resources to the cloud increases reliability. Here’s why.
No matter how large your company or how resilient your IT systems are, chances are high that you don’t rival Google or Amazon in terms of scale. Even enterprise operations don’t have data storage and IT infrastructure teams anywhere near the size of those same business units at AWS, IBM, and other cloud providers.
With such a massive scale, cloud providers can do a lot that other businesses can’t do themselves. Reliability is just one of many benefits, though it’s one of the most important. Because of cloud providers’ scale and focus, they can offer a product that’s far more reliable than what most businesses can develop internally.
In the rare case that there’s a problem, the large cloud providers will assign a small army of engineers to resolve it, usually faster than your own in-house team would even be able to diagnose the issue.
Of course, not every cloud provider is a global behemoth corporation. Yes, there are also smaller players in cloud storage and cloud infrastructure. But they’ve devoted their entire focus to keeping their cloud servers running, and they stake their reputation (and livelihoods) on delivering on those promises.
No More Worrying About Hardware Failures and Downtime
Related to the previous point, when you move your data and infrastructure to the cloud, you can shed all sorts of worry, expense, operational risk, and time spent attending to stuff like hardware failures, backups, and downtime.
Since you don’t own the hardware, you aren’t on the hook when it fails. You don’t have to track down your vendor, buy a new server, get it installed and configured and reloaded from backup, or pay the bill for the new hardware.
Everyone can appreciate the time savings and reduced hassle. And for some businesses, the cost of unexpectedly needing to procure a new server could be devastating.
By moving to the cloud, you won’t need to worry about any of this. Your cloud partner can easily absorb the cost given their scale. And, thanks to their built-in redundancies, you’re unlikely to ever notice any issue resulting from hardware failure. Everything on your end just works.
Let Someone Else Worry About Backups and Redundancy
While you’ll want to pay attention to your cloud provider’s policies in this area, most cloud contracts also include backup, redundancy, and recovery services built-in. Cloud providers typically already build in redundancies, meaning your data exists on more than one physical server. If something goes wrong with your primary cloud location, your provider can source a backup elsewhere.
Compare that to the situation in which your server is in your building’s basement or a spare closet. It’s on you to make sure your backups are running regularly and are actually usable in case of emergency. It’s far easier to let your cloud provider handle all of this.
Greatly Reduce Your Cybersecurity Risk
Lastly, transitioning to the cloud greatly reduces your cybersecurity risks. The cloud can’t stop credential compromise (such as through phishing and spear-phishing campaigns). But it does remove a crucial attack vector: poorly secured servers and other infrastructure at small to medium businesses.
This also comes down to scale. There’s just no way most businesses can stay as on top of IT security as the cloud giants can. If you have a server on-premises, it is very likely more vulnerable than anything at the nearest AWS datacenter. So by moving to the cloud, you’ll actually lower your risk of an attack.
Got questions about moving to the cloud? Looking for a partner to help you with your cloud migration (or the rest of your IT services needs)? Advisory NYC is here for you. Click or call today to get started.
