Top 5 Reasons to Move your Business to the Cloud

Are you concerned about the rising cost of cooling your data center? How about the amount of servers you have to purchase to maintain your existing infrastructure? Now, add the qualified staff to maintain those servers and you have tremendous capital expenditures for maintaining and growing a data center. Imagine a world where you can forget about infrastructure, staff and cooling costs and just concentrate on your applications and core business. These are the inherent benefits to cloud computing.

Here are my top 5 reasons why you should move your business to the cloud:

Cost - On-Premise Desktop applications are expensive. For example, a single license of Microsoft Office 2010 could cost up to $500.00. With that license, you may also have to purchase a support contract and IT staff to support your end users. Spread these costs over several hundred or thousands of employees and the associated costs begin to add up. With a cloud-based approach, the amount you spend decreases tremendously as you move from a licensing model to a “pay-as-you-go” model. Alternatively, you could leverage Google Apps for Business for a fixed cost per user and switch to a cloud based desktop office application solution. For more information, see Google Apps for Business success stories. With a solution such as Google Apps for Business, you can replace skyrocketing ongoing costs with a set monthly fee that you can build a budget around. For example, if you chose Google Apps for Business over Microsoft Exchange, you could save over 118,000 dollars over 3 years. For more information on these savings see the following: Calculate your Savings.

Efficiency - Moving to a cloud platform will allow you as an organization to become more efficient.  Examples include: virtual classroom deployment and shorter development/QA cycle time. When it comes to virtual classrooms, these configuration can become quite complex and require routers, switches and servers to mimic real-world scenarios. Often these environments are maintained by internal staff and not IT Pros. The end result is a non-supported environment that may or may not work when needed. With a cloud server, you can create training environments in the cloud without all the expensive hardware to maintain. Potentially, each student could access their own personal training environment via a web browser. Furthermore, a cloud solution allows for a development organization to solve critical issues without having to wait on laborious configurations to complete in order to troubleshoot a defect. For example, you could leverage a virtual development platform and if a QA individual finds a bug on a specific build, he/she could check in the configuration to the cloud and provide a developer with a web link to quickly bring up the environment to debug.

Elasticity – Clouds are elastic. You can add and remove space to meet the needs of your business. For example, if you are an online retailer and during the Christmas season, your demand exceeds your on-premise data center, you can leverage a hybrid cloud to automatically spin up additional web servers in the cloud to handle the load. Once demand decreases, the web servers in the cloud can be spun down or destroyed. This is the beauty of the cloud. The ability to scale up and down depending on demand is what makes cloud computing so powerful.

Security – Clouds are secure. Security is one of the biggest barriers of adoption when moving to the cloud. It is important for you to ask the right questions when seeking a cloud provider. Any reputable cloud provider can answer your security questions to put your mind at ease.  In addition, you should review the Cloud Security Controls Matrix to help guide you in assessing the security risk of a cloud provider.

Don’t get left behind in the clouds - Cloud computing is the future. According to Gartner, cloud services revenue is projected to reach 148.8 billion through 2014.    If you move too slowly, your competition could out maneuver you. Do your diligence and look at all the cloud players that exist today and begin to leverage the power of cloud computing for your business. With the ability to create a hybrid cloud, there is no reason why you should not begin leveraging the power of the cloud to enhance your business model.