Why Cloud?

Why Cloud? This is a question that is in trend nowadays.

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. while doing so. 

Some of the cloud options available

- Amazon 

- Microsoft Azure

- IBM Cloud

- Google Cloud

- NextCloud

- Rackspace Cloud

- and more....

Businesses and consumers are increasingly relying on cloud based storage solutions instead of in-house, on-premise local storage hardware mainly to decrease the downtime and cost of storage and migration. Besides, being able to focus on business initiatives and objectives, more than avoid the focus on application and infrastructure updates from time to time.

Why go for the cloud?

- Saving of upfront cost of managing huge IT systems which in due course may become redundant

- Storage and backup flexibility

- Increased resiliency with no focus on server maintenance

- Increased scalability as a business expands into newer markets and regions

- Smaller teams and efforts required to monitor and manage the application and infrastructure

- More focus on data privacy and security with hybrid cloud options

While the decision makers and key stakeholders of businesses identify this as a business process re-engineering for their organizations, one definitely needs to focus on what are the priorities and the applications that need to be on cloud and/or on-premise, considering the sensitivity of processes and data of each business unit.

A cloud consultant would ask some of 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 would present governance models, security models, performance models, process models and data models in addition to basic infrastructure.

With business requiring to answer all the above questions and much more, the first priority for every business would be to have a common goal, strategy and execution plan in place which would make this move to the cloud successful, to the business and its customers.