50 Benefits of Cloud Migration

There are numerous advantages of cloud migration. Which apply in your case depends on your IT setup prior to cloud migration, the cloud architecture you decide to adopt and the cloud providers you decide to use.

Horizontal Scalability (from using IaaS offerings)

Adding an extra server to your on-premises IT infrastructure is a hassle. Adding an extra virtual server in the cloud, such as a new Amazon EC2 instance, is a doddle, taking mere seconds. This rapid provisioning is a major reason why cloud migration is so popular. Cloud infrastructure is so much easier to set up, scale and manage than on-premise IT.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas) providers such as Amazon make it easy to add vast amounts of capacity almost instantly. Your corporate credit card will run out of available credit balance long before Amazon runs out of servers to allocate to you.

IaaS providers and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) providers make it easy to store vast amounts of data using their object storage services.

These services are designed to scale horizontally to a ridiculous degree.

For example, AWS's flagship object storage product, Amazon S3, stores over 100 trillion items. Each item can be up to 5 Terabytes large.

Vertical Scalability (from using IaaS offerings)

Cloud providers often let you choose from a range of compute 'instance types.' You can usually upgrade these almost instantly with just a few clicks of your mouse in a web-based control panel or by entering a few commands into a shell.

The instance gets the extra memory and computing power you wanted in seconds, usually with no noticeable downtime. These upgrades provide a great way to cope with rising demand without having to re-engineer workloads to scale horizontally.

The cloud offers an easy way to eliminate simple resource bottlenecks rapidly. Lack memory? Pick another virtual machine (VM) instance type with more memory. Server processing maxed out? Pick one with more computing power.

It's often cheaper to pay a bit more per month to a cloud provider than work to fix the underlying problem. Developers' time is valuable, and your developers may have more important things to focus on, at least in the short term.

Horizontal Scalability (from using SaaS and PaaS offering)

Many Software-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service offerings effortlessly and instantly scale to cope with whatever you can throw at them.

Software-as-a-Service platform Salesforce currently supports over 150 million users. Microsoft 365 supports over 258 million users! To put those numbers in context, the world's largest employer has just 3.2 million staff. Salesforce and Microsoft could probably create an account for each of those 3.2 million staff without even needing to provision any new capacity.

Platform-as-a-Service provider SendGrid sends over a trillion emails a year. That's 150 for every man, woman and child on the planet.

The last email you got from Uber was probably delivered by SendGrid. That email you got from Spotify? That was probably delivered by SendGrid too.

No matter how many emails your organisation needs to send each year, a platform-as-a-service provider like SendGrid could cope in its sleep.

Most similarly large cloud service providers have sophisticated IT architectures that use content delivery networks (CDNs), load balancers and autoscaling, with new containers and VMs spun up as needed.

These providers have usually decoupled their front-end servers from their database servers, storage platforms and the servers powering searches.

Downward Scalability

When 'scalability' is discussed in IT, the focus tends to be on scaling upwards. However, downward scalability also matters because it can cut your cloud bills.

SaaS services will often charge you based on the number of user accounts you have. Reduce the number of users, and your monthly bill is likely to fall too.

Typically any price fall will occur on your monthly renewal date, though some providers give a pro-rata credit for user accounts and services deleted mid-month.

For those in a position to create cloud-native apps, container orchestration technologies - such as Kubernetes - can be used to scale down cloud resources automatically when demand is low.

If you're willing to re-code your systems as cloud native apps, it's even possible to scale down to having no permanent servers at all! Some big public cloud providers offer serverless computing services such as Azure Functions, AWS Lamda and Google Cloud Functions.

These let you pay for function execution, not servers. Unfortunately, these services are not suitable for most workloads as most workloads require greater persistence than serverless functions offer.

Cost Savings

Some organisations save money by migrating workloads to the cloud. That's particularly true for organisations that require a lot of computing resources only during periods of peak demand or temporarily. Cloud services are usually good value given how much it would cost to replicate the same level of IT sophistication on-premise.

Cloud services include the full costs of the IT, including elements that are erroneously treated as 'free' by on-premise IT, for example building rental, electricity, business rates, insurance, and the labour costs of hardware configuration, monitoring, patching and fixing things.

The biggest cloud providers have significant bargaining power when negotiating with hardware manufacturers as these big cloud players buy a huge amount of equipment, including over 50% of new servers.

Large cloud providers also use custom chipsets, hardware-optimised operating systems and modern power-efficient data centres. This helps them save money and is part of the reason cloud providers like AWS have been able to increase profit margins while decreasing retail prices for cloud computing services.

For those able to re-architect their apps to take advantage of serverless computing and Kubernetes, there can be additional savings from moving away from paying for reserved capacity, instead paying a bill based on usage.

Competitive Advantage from Faster, Fuller Cloud Adoption

Cloud migration allows firms of all sizes to use advanced IT that was previously the preserve of billion-dollar firms and technically adept organisations with massive IT budgets - think multinationals, investment banks, universities and tech startups. These organisations tough demands and fat wallets shaped cloud providers offerings. Now you get to benefit from that.

You can gain a competitive advantage over larger rivals that are slow to embrace the cloud because they fail to understand the benefits or are unduly concerned about surmountable cloud migration challenges.

If you opt not to migrate IT to the cloud, your organisation may get left behind by rivals that use the cloud to improve the scalability, affordability, reliability and agility of their IT platform.

This isn't just about migrating your virtual machines from on-premise systems to the platforms of cloud providers. It's also about making appropriate use of SaaS to gain access to feature-rich, rapidly innovating, integration-friendly, collaboration-friendly software on an accessible per-user-per-month pricing model.

Near-Instant Provisioning of Services

Cloud migration allows firms of all sizes to use advanced IT that was previously the preserve of billion-dollar firms and technically adept organisations with massive IT budgets - think multinationals, investment banks, universities and tech startups. These organisations tough demands and fat wallets shaped cloud providers offerings. Now you get to benefit from that.

You can gain a competitive advantage over larger rivals that are slow to embrace the cloud because they fail to understand the benefits or are unduly concerned about surmountable cloud migration challenges.

If you opt not to migrate IT to the cloud, your organisation may get left behind by rivals that use the cloud to improve the scalability, affordability, reliability and agility of their IT platform.

This isn't just about migrating your virtual machines from on-premise systems to the platforms of cloud providers. It's also about making appropriate use of SaaS to gain access to feature-rich, rapidly innovating, integration-friendly, collaboration-friendly software on an accessible per-user-per-month pricing model.

No Hardware To Buy or Configure

Cloud migration allows firms of all sizes to use advanced IT that was previously the preserve of billion-dollar firms and technically adept organisations with massive IT budgets - think multinationals, investment banks, universities and tech startups. These organisations tough demands and fat wallets shaped cloud providers offerings. Now you get to benefit from that.

You can gain a competitive advantage over larger rivals that are slow to embrace the cloud because they fail to understand the benefits or are unduly concerned about surmountable cloud migration challenges.

If you opt not to migrate IT to the cloud, your organisation may get left behind by rivals that use the cloud to improve the scalability, affordability, reliability and agility of their IT platform.

This isn't just about migrating your virtual machines from on-premise systems to the platforms of cloud providers. It's also about making appropriate use of SaaS to gain access to feature-rich, rapidly innovating, integration-friendly, collaboration-friendly software on an accessible per-user-per-month pricing model.

Free Up Physical Space On-Premise Previously Taken Up Hosting Servers and SANs

One of the many benefits of cloud migration is that your cloud provider will take care of the hosting, freeing up space in your server room and making office moves that bit simpler.

The growth of work-from-home has led many firms to look to reduce the amount of office space they rent. Some are even moving into multi-tenant serviced offices. Getting rid of your on-prem servers can be helpful, helping you make do with less server-room space.

Superior Hosting Environment

If you use a cloud provider's services, your workloads will likely be hosted in data centres with strong physical security, 24/7 guarding, raised floors, dual power feeds from the grid, backup generators, uninterruptible power supplies, industrial-strength air conditioning, very early smoke detection alarms, mantraps and CCTV.

These factors make the cloud environment superior to what you're likely to have on-premise.

IT Staff Freed To Focus on Company-Specific Issues

Your IT teams no longer need to spend time ordering, setting up or upgrading physical servers and storage devices, as cloud providers take care of those tasks.

Organisation's IT teams are often small. Outsourcing some tasks to a cloud service provider allows internal IT teams to focus on more transformational tasks.

Migrating to the cloud may seem intimidating to small teams. Luckily, cloud providers and cloud consultancies offer migration services that do much of the work for you, uncovering resource requirements and dependencies, designing and building your new cloud, and helping with the data migration.

Performance-Optimised IT

Cloud providers tend to be good at setting up and optimising their systems to ensure high levels of performance.

Part of that is strategic. It's easier to set up and support just one high-performance platform for use by all customers than it is to set up and support many different platforms, each doing the same thing but with a different level of performance. It's easier just to give everyone the same high performance levels.

Part of the improved performance is down to cloud providers buying more and better hardware. For example, cloud providers often buy far more storage capacity than typical firms and use Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) systems for much data storage in place of slower disk-based storage systems.

Another factor is that cloud providers employ technical specialists that really understand how to optimise particular aspects of IT. Network engineers design their network. Data storage experts design their storage platforms.

It's common for workloads that are migrated to the cloud to get faster because they're moving from a poorly optimised on-premise system to a highly optimised cloud-hosted platform. This change often manifests itself in faster website hosting, quicker searchers, and IT resources that no longer seem to struggle during busy periods.

Another factor behind the larger cloud providers performance gains is that they have the scale to be able to host industrial-scale databases with lightning query response times, something that's difficult and expensive to deliver on-premise.

Reduced Carbon Footprint

Another benefit of cloud migration is that it provides an easy way to cut your carbon footprint.

Most cloud providers use green energy to power some or all of their data centres. Some want to be green. Most want to be seen to be green.

Their larger customers - especially public sector bodies and listed firms - have publicly committed to reducing their carbon footprints, so they welcome the turn-key reductions in emissions that hosting providers can deliver.

This greenery mainly involves buying energy from business electricity suppliers that have supply agreements with renewable energy generators operating wind farms, solar farms, tidal schemes or biomass burners.

Carbon offsets tend to play a role, compensating for any non-green energy that's been used as a result of the energy grid's need to keep the lights on when there's not enough green power.

Green energy isn't the only way cloud providers cut their carbon footprint. Cloud providers routinely decommission older hardware, shifting workloads onto newer hardware that's more power-efficient and space-efficient. This helps keep hosting costs down, with the old equipment being re-purposed or recycled.

Some newer data centres in cheap locations even have solar panels and direct air-cooling technology.

If your firm bids for business from public sector bodies or large organisations, you'll increasingly be asked questions about your environmental sustainability practices. Using cloud services powered by green energy is an easy way to mildly boost your organisation's green credentials.

Faster Data Transfers

Benefits of moving to the cloud include busting a common bandwidth bottleneck.

Servers hosted at your office are usually connected to the outside world via a leased line, limiting the speed at which data can be transferred - often to 100 Mbps or 1 Gbps. Cloud servers may be able to be transfer data far faster, as they're in data centres where plentiful connectivity is available at comparatively cheap prices.

Much of the developed world is in the process of rolling out full-fibre gigabit broadband, including to the homes of employees, customers and suppliers working from home. Any servers that serve material amounts of data to these groups need to be able to take advantage of these rising connectivity speeds. That's simply not possible in typical offices, where 10Gbps and 100Gbps connections are too costly.

VPN devices and File Servers are having to migrate to the cloud to avoid the corporate office's leased line becoming a performance bottleneck. We're finding many firms are reducing their use of file servers, opting instead to use OneDrive or SharePoint to store and share documents.

Less OS Patching To Do

Some IaaS providers can patch your guest operating systems for you, reducing the risk of your being hacked.

With SaaS and PaaS providers, you don't even need to worry about the underlying OS. That's your provider's responsibility.

Less Application Patching To Do

Many SaaS services deliver software experiences through a standard web browser. These services are patched automatically without your IT department having to do anything and without your users having to do anything - except perhaps to log back in.

Falling Hosting Costs

Another cloud migration benefit is falling hosting costs. Cloud hosting is a competitive business, so as the costs of processors, memory, data storage and networking equipment fall, so do cloud hosting prices, at least for new contracts.

You can benefit from falling hardware prices without having to buy new hardware. All you need do is migrate to the cloud, then when your hosting contract's initial period is up, shop around.

Often, your existing cloud provider will be willing to match lower prices you may discover for comparable services.

Hosting costs will likely continue to fall as processors, memory, data storage, and networking equipment get ever cheaper, with these reductions offsetting rising electricity prices caused by the surging demand from electric cars, electric boilers and heat pumps.

Operators of the largest cloud offerings (AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform) are in this the long haul and have been happy to subsidise their cloud divisions to the tune of billions of dollars.

This aggressive, cross-subsidised race for market share has reduced margin expansion. Many second-tier cloud providers (IBM, Oracle etc.) have to stay active in the cloud marketplace - accepting whatever margin they can make - as otherwise, they risk losing highly-profitable legacy revenues to tier 1 cloud players.

The IaaS/PaaS/SaaS model involves less labour and more automation. There are fewer middlemen and salesmen to pay. So as hardware costs fall and margins remaining compressed, retail prices for cloud services fall.

Better Data Backup Options

Some cloud services backup your data regularly for free as part of their service.

It's easier to backup cloud-hosted systems to an offsite location than it is to do the same from an on-premise system.

That's because cloud hosting providers have fast Internet connections, so they are able to transfer data to cloud hosted backup repositories far more quickly.

This may mean shorter backup windows and quicker restoration of lost/corrupted files and databases.

Less Need To Plan Capacity Well In Advance

Benefits of migrating to the cloud include eliminating the need to plan your IT infrastructure capacity years in advance.

Scalable pay-as-you-go cloud services make capacity planning less important than was the case historically, as there's no longer a need to over-provision capacity several years in advance to ensure future scalability. You just need to check that the costs would be acceptable if you did require additional capacity at a later date.

That's not to say there no value in capacity planning. Cloud providers offer steep discounts for longer-term commitments, so it's wise to buy your minimum capacity requirements under a multi-year contract. These can almost always be amended if it turns out you need to add more capacity.

Fewer IT Skills Shortages

Using cloud services allows you to delegate certain responsibilities to your cloud providers. Perhaps you no longer need someone who understands how to configure storage arrays or add memory to a physical server.

The role of IT staff shifts away from server-room hardware maintenance and towards systems analysis, external supplier management, troubleshooting higher up the stack, liaising with end-users and training them.

IT staff have little to fear from this shift. Except at a few large companies, this shift is unlikely to lead to job losses. The demand for IT skills is rising as ever more business is conducted digitally, and companies seek to automate business processes and roll out self-service to customers via online channels.

More Resilient IT

SaaS providers, PaaS providers and most IaaS providers design their services to be more resilient than typical on-premise systems.

That's not because they're charitable. It's because it's easier to add spare capacity, system monitoring and automatic failover, so when there's a problem there's less fallout than if a less resilient platform had been in place, causing support chaos, customer churn and reputational damage.

That's not to say there will be no downtime or that Service Level Agreements won't sometimes be breached. However, cloud services are usually at least as reliable as the on-premises systems they replace.

Enhanced Out-of-Hours IT Platform Support - Possibly 24/7

Most cloud service providers operate 24/7. They monitor their systems, so some problems are flagged even before customers have reported a fault.

In-house IT provision tends to be largely constrained to business hours, with coverage out of hours coverage dependent on IT staff's willingness to cut into their leisure time and holiday leave.

That situation isn't ideal for them or their end-users.

Improved IT Security

Large Government departments and multinationals demand high levels of IT security from their cloud providers. Partly as a result of this, IaaS, PaaS and SaaS providers that would like such big-spending firms as clients opt to implement stringent security measures, including data security measures.

This will often include independent auditing of compliance by an accredited auditor. One common international standard in respect to security practices is ISO 27001, which covers Information Security Management Systems.

Cloud providers tend to host your data in physically secure data centres with CCTV, 24/7 guarding, mantraps, strong internal physical barriers and many other security elements.

Their platforms are usually protected by physical or virtual firewalls, and the operating systems may have new security fixes routinely applied.

Many cloud providers conduct background checks on their staff, including enhanced criminal record checks.

Cloud providers often have much better security than their customers in relation to the restrictive granting of administrative privileges, use of two-factor authentication, penetration testing, remote access security and backup encryption.

While, in theory, on-premise DIY hosting should be more secure than relying on a cloud provider, in practice, the reverse is often true.

On-premise systems tend to suffer a number of security issues, including lax patching regimes, poor network segmentation and multiple services running within VMs instead of each being isolated in their own VMs.

Free Trials and Rolling Monthly Contracts

One of the many benefits of cloud migration is that cloud providers often offer free trials, so you can try a service for yourself before deciding whether to migrate to a given cloud provider.

Even if your chosen cloud provider doesn't offer free trials, ask a salesman if a free trial would be possible. If you're obviously serious, the answer might well be a yes.

Even if the trial period proves insufficient, many services allow customers to pay on a rolling monthly basis, allowing you to continue trialling the service for a while longer.

Once the customer is satisfied the cloud service meets their needs, they may opt to switch to a yearly contract or multi-year contract - paid monthly, quarterly or yearly - to secure steep discounts in return for leasing reserved instances.

Service Level Agreements

Many cloud providers guarantee a certain level of service. If that service level isn't met, customers may be entitled to compensation, typically in the form of service credits.

Simplified Troubleshooting

By migrating to a cloud platform that's resilient, scalable, well-configured and actively monitored, a lot of potential problems are minimised. This simplifies troubleshooting by eliminating many factors that cause errors.

Improved IT Visibility

IT staff's hard work maintaining server-based IT tends to be taken for granted. By shifting much of that unappreciated work to cloud providers, IT staff can shift their focus towards higher profile work transforming IT rather than just maintaining IT in the shadows.

This isn't about boosting egos. It's about recognising the need for IT's contribution to be visible so IT doesn't lose out to other areas of the business when budgets are allocated.

Organisations are under pressure to do more with less, and to do it faster, and to give customers more information and control. IT is critical to delivering all that. Outsourcing to cloud providers frees up internal IT staff to work on digital transformation projects.

External Scapegoat for IT Platform Issues

When things go right with on-premise IT, the IT staff get no credit. When things go wrong, the IT staff get the blame, often unfairly.

By outsourcing hosting to a competent cloud provider, your IT team can absolve themselves of much of the blame should there be a hosting problem.

Reassurance For Customers, Insurers and Investors

If your organisation hosts applications for its customers, your potential customers may ask about the hosting arrangements for their data. Where is their data going to be hosted? What security measures are in place?

Many smaller software firms find that they can improve their tender responses by piggybacking on their hosting provider’s security credentials.

Perhaps the requirements of ISO 27001 (a well-regarded international standard covering Information Security Management Systems) are too onerous for your small organisation, but your cloud hosting provider has that certification, so it can provide some of the reassurance your customers seek.

The same goes for other nice-to-have but bureaucratic-to-get standards.

Multi-Country Hosting Options

Another advantage of cloud migration is that the largest public cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google, IBM) can host your workloads in dozens of countries under a single master contract.

Your dynamic website can be served from servers local to the visitor's country or at least their region. So there's no need to sign a colocation contract with a company in Amsterdam or to ship servers to particular countries. You can take a virtual machine image and boot it up in dozens of regions.

The largest SaaS providers don't tend to offer that degree of choice but will often give users the option of having their data hosted in the US or the EU.

Unsurprisingly, many UK-based firms offering cloud hosting opt to host their platforms' servers, data storage devices and data backup devices in the UK. This isn't just about convenience, but also about legal jurisdiction. Those firms' UK customers tend to prefer to keep their data under the UK law courts' jurisdiction and under the UK version of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Frequent Feature Updates (SaaS)

Many software-as-a-service offers are delivered via web browsers instead of via separate desktop software. This makes it possible for the software to be updated without any changes to the desktop and without the assistance of IT administrators and users. It also eliminates the need to create multiple versions of the software to accommodate typical PC users, Mac users and users with outdated PCs.

When combined with spare cloud servers, load balancers and expedited session time-outs, it's not uncommon for SaaS providers to be able to update their software with barely any adverse impact on users. This allows for faster bug-fixing and frequent rollout of new features.

Increased IT Platform Homogeneity

The shift towards cloud-hosted SaaS offerings has encouraged software manufacturers of all types to give subscribers the latest version of the company's software.

This turns on its head the traditional model of saving up major changes for the next 'major' version and hoping the difference in functionality is sufficient to motivate a large number of users to pay a one-off fee to upgrade.

When everyone has the latest stable version of the software, IT support becomes far easier.

Errors become easier to replicate.

When an IT staff member talks an end-user through how to do something, there's a greater chance both users will see the same options on their screens.

And with just one version to train users on, training users becomes easier.

Web-based SaaS services don't complicate the desktop estate. They're just another website, creating no software conflicts with programs installed on the desktop.

The shift towards PaaS has also brought greater homogeneity by hiding many underlying complexities from software developers.

The end result is that supposedly non-tech companies are increasingly able to deliver increasingly technical outcomes using process automation, customer self-service, portals and APIs.

Simplified Container Hosting and Orchestration

Many corporate workloads run on guest operating systems running on virtual machines. These guest OSes require patching, they may require software licence payments to be made, and they may introduce unwanted variations in behaviour between production, staging and testing environments. Containerisation can help fix these issues.

Some cloud providers offer services that make it easier to deploy containerised applications without having to worry about the underlying hosting platform.

Some platforms also make it easier to orchestrate these containers. The big public cloud providers offer Kubernetes services such as Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service), Azure Kubernetes Service and Google Kubernetes Engine, which do away with the need for you to build your own Kubernetes platform.

Programmatic Provisioning

Many cloud providers have APIs, making it possible for you to add, configure, freeze or unfreeze users, VMs and IT resources using code. This has the potential to cut costs, speed up provisioning, reduce human error and preserve customer privacy.

The large public clouds also have shells through which you can provision services with short text commands.

IT Staff Career Boost

The cloud has become central to how IT is delivered. This has implications for IT professionals' careers.

Most employers already use cloud services. Many already have business-critical workloads hosted in the cloud. When these employers make hiring decisions, they'll want to hire IT staff that have experience managing cloud suppliers.

Many organisations have migrated workloads to the cloud but still have workloads left they plan to migrate. They'll want to hire staff with experience of overseeing cloud migrations, given that's what's on their own road map.

Perhaps, in a few years time, you'll be in an interview, mentioning that time you improved scalability, uptime, resilience, performance and speed of provisioning by migrating workloads to the cloud. You don't need to tell them that your cloud provider did most of the work!

Cloud providers increasingly take the strain when it comes to upgrading and patching hardware and software out-of-hours, reducing the need for in-house IT staff to stay late or come in at the weekend.

Best-in-Class Software (from hosted SaaS focused on serving niches)

Desktop software remains the most functional option for some tasks, such as creative image editing. However, increasingly, web-based software-as-a-service offerings are becoming the best option for many niche business requirements.

For example, if you want the most feature-rich, extendible Customer Relationship Management software, Salesforce is going to be among the top options, not least because of its partner ecosystem.

Cloud-hosted SaaS is increasingly rivalling on-premise software options and usurping website scripts, modules and custom-code as the best way of achieving many outcomes, from quick landing page creation, to data capture, to website usage analytics, to credit card processing, to managing employee holiday requests, to tracking contract approvals.

The benefit isn’t just the breadth of features on offer, but also the speed with which such solutions can be integrated into existing workflows, the robustness of the solution, and the fact that once implemented, the solution just works - without IT having to maintain it.

Faster IT Fault Remediation

Moving to the cloud can increase the speed with which service faults are found.

By combining automated service monitoring, virtualisation and/or containerisation and extended-hours (or 24/7) support, cloud providers are able to identify many faults quickly, restart errant instances and begin troubleshooting far more quickly than would be the case for many internal IT setups.

If a problem occurs at 2 am, it's not going to take till 9 am for someone to notice it and begin remediation, as would often be the case with traditional on-premises IT.

Improved Compliance Tools, Logs and Audit Trails

Some of the largest SaaS providers offer tools that help with compliance, legal discovery and proving what's been done, by whom and when.

These can be particularly helpful if an employee goes rogue, your firm gets sued, or there is uncertainty over who made a particular change.

IT Costs More Closely Aligned With Usage Levels

Cloud services tend to charge by users or usage levels. This suits many organisations as it allows non-labour IT costs to fluctuate in line with business performance.

When business is rosy and lots of new staff are hired, per-user priced SaaS service costs rise. When business is quiet and staff numbers dwindle as employees leave and are not replaced as quickly, those SaaS costs fall.

Similarly, when lots of customers are signing contracts for hosted services that require more IT infrastructure, IaaS costs rise. When customers hold off signing those contracts, and existing customers resources are released, IaaS costs fall.

With traditional on-premises IT, it is hard to make IT costs rise and fall in line with demand, as hardware purchases need to reflect what the business expects to require in two to three years time.

Senior decision-makers in your business, mindful of preserving working capital, are probably happier paying for just-in-time bought-only-when-needed cloud services instead of having to invest in hardware upgrades that may not be fully used for years to come.

Making a Wider Range of Technology Choices Practical

The IT skills gap means that many useful technologies that could in theory be of use to organisations don't make it into production systems. The learning curve and practical difficulties of adopting many 'free' and 'innovative' technologies are just too high. Cloud services can help fix this.

For example, many of the giant public cloud services make it simpler to use things such as open-source databases, elastic search, containers, autoscaling and machine learning, without having to have experts on staff who truly understand these technologies.

Cloud providers do the difficult bit of setting up these technologies, scaling the IT platform required to use them, and optimising the stack for those technologies requirements.

The benefit isn't that you get to use these new technologies. It's that you get the benefits of these new technologies without having to worry about the minutia of implementation.

To give one example, perhaps you don't need Microsoft SQL Server to have a scalable, reliable database now that there are cloud-based managed database-as-a-service options available, including cheaper ones based on open-source databases.

Improved Employee Productivity

Cloud services can make your organisations' employees more productive.

They let your IT staff deliver infrastructure faster. These services reliability reduces the amount of time spent troubleshooting IT platforms.

More broadly, cloud services usually improve performance, for example enabling end-users to search their entire email archive in seconds. Cloud hosting may make internal web-applications load faster, meaning your staff spend less time waiting for the app to load.

The reliability of cloud services reduces staff time lost to IT service outages.

Web-based SaaS services often do away with the need to patch desktop software, other than the web browser, the office suite and the VPN client.

Cloud-based file syncing services like Dropbox and OneDrive help ensure staff continue to have access to the files they need, even when working from home.

Improved Marketing Outcomes

Cloud-based SaaS and PaaS services such as MailChimp and SendGrid can improve the deliverability of your emails and personalise emails at scale.

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and scalable cloud hosting can improve the speed with which your website loads, reducing your visitor's bounce rate and potentially boosting your search engine rankings slightly.

Cloud-based landing page editors such as those offered by Hubspot, Unbounce and LeadPages can enable marketing staff to rapidly create landing pages to support email campaigns, events and online campaigns.

The Replacement of Problematic Legacy Systems

Although cloud services offer a lot of benefits, part of their appeal lies in what they allow you to kill off - legacy systems that lack modern features, lack scalability and lack the ability to easily integrate with your other systems.

Some of these legacy systems reach the end of vendor support, making support more expensive and harder to obtain. Often, security bugs in these older systems will not be patched.

Unsupported applications were often designed for less modern operating systems. To keep these old apps running, you have to keep old operating systems running too, even though it can be hard to find cost-effective support and the software manufacturer may have stopped patching security holes.

Faster Disaster Recovery for your IT Systems

Restoring backed up systems to a cloud can be one of the smartest options for speeding up recovery.

For example, Disaster Recovery as a Service can backup your business data to an offsite data centre then restore it within minutes to an IT platform hosted in the cloud.

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)

We've already mentioned that cloud providers tend to offer APIs for provisioning purposes. However, APIs often offer far more than just that, especially when it comes to SaaS services.

These almost always have APIs, allowing you to easily integrate different cloud services, by using the integration tools of Zapier, Boomi, Informatica, Jitterbit or Adaptris.

The end result is you get MOST of the behaviour you want and a lot of automation without having to code everything from scratch or manually copy-and-paste data from one system to another.

Not only does this improve efficiency (cutting labour cost), it also speeds up processes and reduces human error.

APIs also make it programmatically simple to achieve complex things by offloading the complexity to external parties better able to handle that complexity because it's their bread and butter.

Platform-Level Protection Against DDoS, Data Loss, Hardware Failure

Cloud providers are often able to shoulder some of the burden of protecting your workloads against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.

Regular backups may be included as part of your service. Usually, this is to protect you against data losses caused by your cloud service provider, so you're protected against hardware failures and the like. Such backups aren't necessarily designed to protect you fully against the consequences of your end-users or admins accidentally deleting or overwriting things.

Unless you've opted for a dedicated private cloud or colocation of your own server, hardware failures are likely to be your cloud providers problem, not yours, other than in the very short term.

Ultimately, your cloud provider is not responsible for saving you from customer-specific DDoS attacks or misuse of your users' login credentials. However, you're likely to get some level of platform-level protection from your SaaS/PaaS/IaaS provider.

Zero-Work Hardware Refreshes

Another advantage of moving to the cloud is that cloud providers will occasionally upgrade or replace their main cloud hosting platforms without you having to do anything. They do this to improve scalability, while minimising IT sprawl.

Although there's a cost to buying new hardware, there's also a cost to maintaining and colocation both old and new hardware.

By gradually retiring older IT and replacing it with higher-capacity and faster equipment, cloud service providers are able to increase capacity while maintaining similar maintenance and colocation costs.

Simplified IT Department Role

Many departments that would previously have had to go through the IT department to get servers provisioned and new software installed can instead sign up for niche cloud based services themselves, such as web-based SaaS apps focused on the particular needs of Marketers, HR personnel, Support Desk team members, Office Managers, Finance teams or Software Developers.

This has several benefits for IT departments. It reduces the number of server-based workloads the IT team needs to support. It shifts much of the burden of user support onto the SaaS providers.

And it shifts the financial cost of the IT element to the relevant department's budget.

With no need to involve IT in provisioning, departments are free to sign up for several free trials of competing software-as-a-service offerings to see which one suits them best.

Those trials are able to start almost instantly, without IT having to do anything. And managing user accounts and credentials becomes a matter for departmental teams.

Improved Mac Compatibility (SaaS)

Now that many employees use their own computing devices to work from home or from hotdesks in the office, there's a need for most IT departments to cater to Macs.

Cloud-based software-as-a-service providers offer an easy way to do this. Almost all their apps are designed to work well in Safari, the default web browser on Apple devices, in addition to working well on Chromium-based browsers such as Chrome, Edge and Opera.

Billion-dollar software-as-a-service providers usually often native apps for iOS, Android and Windows devices, usually in addition to web-based versions.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Benefits

Some firms that need to keep confidential data secure but which want to allow working-from-home opt for cloud-hosted virtual desktops.

Typically, employees use their own untrusted devices to access trusted, locked-down virtual desktops hosted in a data centre. This setup reduces data leakage as only key presses, mouse movements and screenshots could be captured by a compromised user device.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure's transition to the mainstream has been of the one great white hopes of IT for decades. Adoption has been hampered by computer prices falls, unreliable connectivity, restrictive Windows licensing terms and the high costs of many hosted VDI services.

However, Microsoft is planning a renewed push of its VDI offering, with simplified pricing, so Azure Virtual Desktops (and rival services powered by Citrix and VMware) might still become a major advantage of cloud computing.

The biggest benefit is that IT can lock down the desktop, limiting it to IT-approved applications and filtered internet usage, without unduly restricting what employees can install on their own personal devices and without causing privacy concerns.

Virtual Desktops allow new employees to have a working desktop in seconds rather than days.

Ultimately as CPU power and RAM get ever cheaper, there will come a tipping point where the security and ease-of-provisioning benefits of VDI overtake the cost disadvantages.

SaaS Business Model Opportunity (for Independent Software Vendors)

If you're not an independent software vendor, you can skip this point.

Many independent software publishers can transform their business by offering a web-based cloud-hosted version of their software.

Potential customers can be offered time-limited trials, including ones that start instantly.

Multi-tenanted architectures allow smaller customers to be served profitably, as there's less setup involved.

As end-users and their IT administrators no longer need to apply patches, software for SaaS subscribers can be updated more frequently and in smaller increments, allowing faster bug fixes and faster rollouts of new features. This also provides an opportunity for you to gather earlier feedback from users.

Customers switch from infrequent, ad-hoc licence purchases to monthly or yearly subscriptions. This gradually delivers a predictable, growing revenue stream.

The company can focus on software development, offloading responsibility for the hosting platform to a cloud provider.

Reduced Dependence on HQ for IT

Traditionally, organisations host their major IT systems at their headquarters or at other major offices.

If the network connection to that office goes down, users working in other offices or from home get cut off from the data they need to do their jobs.

By migrating workloads to the cloud, you reduce this dependence on the HQ connection, as traffic from secondary offices and staff working from home can reach your virtual servers without having to pass back and forth across the HQ's leased line.

HQ is an office designed for humans. Typically, it lacks backup generators. In many sites, there's just one feed from the electricity grid powering the server room. Migrating to the cloud - and to a hosting environment designed around the needs of data centre hardware - helps cut the risk of outages.

Get Help With Your Cloud Migration

If your UK-based organisation would like to benefit from migrating to the cloud, hSo can help.

Our cloud specialists can advise you on the best way forward and help you migrate from on-premise systems. To find out more, call us on 020 7847 4510.

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