Everyone has heard about moving technology to the cloud – but how do you go from cloud curious to informed about whether you want to proceed?
Cloud infrastructure and processing have become a mature ecosystem being used by organizations large and small all over the globe. Many people are by now familiar with some of the most highlighted opportunities relative to traditional on-premise setups with providers such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. When making your own decision, you, too, should take these beneficial factors into consideration:
Off load infrastructure headaches
Depending on the various services chosen, you could get away from concern around making your servers physically safe, monitored, backed up and able to survive electrical and weather events. Cloud data centers handle these challenges at great scale, often reducing your costs while driving down risks.
Smoothly handle variable demand and usage
Setting up local resources to handle the maximum traffic on your applications is cost inefficient and anticipating actual demand is difficult. Many cloud resources are elastic in that they can easily grow or shrink depending on need – often saving a lot of money and customer frustration in the case that a system is overloaded. So if there is a season of the year, time of the month, or even spikes during each day where demand looks different from others – think about paying by usage and letting things spin down during low usage while remaining ready to handle anticipated and surprise demand spikes.
Leveraging emerging technologies like block chain and machine learning
The availability and integration of emerging technologies will be much faster when utilizing cloud services. Things in technology are always moving fast and having access to the cloud will keep you on the cutting edge while also keeping costs down.
If you are curious about what your organization could look like leveraging the cloud, the good news is you can test drive it without investing a lot of time and money. Cloud resources are quick to spin up and have low setup costs so you can move a single application or task to the cloud as a trial. You can also pivot away quickly with little cost.
If cloud infrastructure feels like a different house down the street you are interested in but don’t want to sell your current home for just yet, consider renting and living in it for a few weeks to see what it feels like. Moving one heavy nightly processing task, one virtual machine, or building that new, small app idea in the cloud can be a great way to sample living there.
There are also many ways to configure hybrid solutions including extending your current network’s security (active directory, etc.) so you can keep your home and the vacation spot without having to pick just one.
InfoWorks is a skilled cloud services partner with consultants certified in some of the best cloud service options. If you’re still cloud curious and need an easy place to start, get in touch and we’ll help you find the solution that’s right for your specific situation.
