https://www.xperience-group.com/news-item/cloud-myths/
When considering a move to the Cloud, many businesses are faced with the common misconception that it should be an ‘all or nothing ‘decision. In reality, it won’t always make practical business sense to move your entire business to the Cloud. Rather than diving headfirst and moving all applications to the cloud straight away, many businesses take a staged approach as part of their overall IT strategy. Here we help you identify what to consider when moving to the cloud.
Before you gear up to take your business to the cloud, it’s important that you first take a step back and review your current IT infrastructure. When doing so, you will need to consider factors such as resilience, back-ups and longevity. Essentially figuring out if your current environment is fit for purpose. If you’re not sure where to start, you can find out if your cloud ready via a Cloud Readiness Report.
The critical applications for most businesses usually include email and document sharing. It’s important that these systems are hosted in an environment that ensures accessibility, uptime and resilience. As these items are critical to business operation, you may be willing to overlook a higher price, so that they are accessible anytime, anywhere, ensuring zero downtime. In this case, you will want the extra layers of resilience the cloud brings.
On the other hand, take your accounts package for example. Although this is crucial to the running of your business, most accounts staff are office-based. Therefore there is no compelling reason for it to be in the cloud. Hosting it on-premise, with functioning back-ups in place may suffice.
The cloud may not benefit all workloads equally, so we never assume that it does. It’s important that you analyse applications on a case-by-case basis. If they’re not critical to the running of your business and accessibility isn’t an issue, don’t be afraid to propose non-cloud solutions when appropriate!
The cloud fits where value is placed on flexibility and the business has the ability to consume and pay for only what is needed when needed. However, not all applications and workloads benefit from the cloud. Unless there are cost savings, moving a legacy application that doesn’t change is not a good candidate. However, you have the budget to invest in going full cloud there’s no harm in getting started with the investment and future-proofing your business.
Once you’ve factored all of the above into the consideration process, only then will you be able to make a sound decision on whether or not cloud is best suited. In some cases it will make sense to move sooner rather than later. Many businesses on their cloud journey have adopted a hybrid approach.
According to global research giant Forrester 58% of companies have adopted and are using hybrid cloud solutions. Hybrid is a cloud computing environment that uses a mix of both cloud and on premise. So while you may not be ready to go ‘full cloud’ just yet, a hybrid approach can be more manageable, and send you off on the beginning of your cloud journey!