Moving to the cloud simplifies the deployment and management of infrastructure and allows your business to quickly scale based on demands. When exploring the many benefits of moving to the cloud, there are two categories to consider: the technical benefits and the financial benefits.
Technical benefits of cloud migration
When you start looking at deploying workloads to the cloud, there's aspects or abilities that come into play that are more limiting on-premises, but more accessible in the cloud, one of them being scalability. The ability to scale out your resources depending on usage, utilization and demand.
Second to that is availability. On-premises, it's more costly to build highly available infrastructure. It's less costly to architect highly available infrastructure on the cloud.
Third, is security and compliance. Within the cloud, cloud software vendors like Microsoft are constantly adding to their security infrastructure and toolsets to keep you on par with what's transpiring with respect to security threats on the global networks.
Fourth, is capacity optimization, meaning that you are only paying for the resources that you are utilizing overtime. So, your capacity can fluctuate depending on those particular demands. And during those load times, within a business cycle, you can scale back resources, or your overall capacity, or scale up depending on what’s required. The core concept to keep in mind is that elasticity as well as on-demand resources is a huge paradigm shift with respect to moving workloads to the cloud. It improves how you actually deploy and provision or deprovision resources more dynamically.
Financial benefits of cloud migration
On the financial side, certainly you start transforming your overall budget allocation from what has historically been a CAPEX investment to OPEX type pricing models that can fluctuate based on capacity or utilization of the cloud environment.
You benefit from the overall reduced data center footprint, those amortized facilities or hosting agreements that you that you have in place, those are no longer required.
You also benefit from overall staffing productivity. These dev operations or DevOps type of concepts where your operations folks are more focused on automation and automating and deploying and deprovisioning workloads more dynamically than racking and stacking servers and dealing with HVAC or heating and cooling type of issues.
You also immediately benefit from a sustainability perspective. Data centers that are hosting cloud services, such as the ones with the Azure, we do at such scale that we benefit from overall sustainability and the least amount of environmental impact. So overall, you really benefit from that flexibility perspective well beyond what you're able to do on-premises with respect to budgets.
Why move to the cloud now?
When should your business move to the cloud? Every business has different needs and reasons for migrating to the cloud. Some common migration triggers include:
A need to support remote work models
Cost efficiency & resource constraints
Cybersecurity threats
Fragile on-premises operations
A need to meet surge demand
For further reading, check out our blog post, How to Decide When to Move to The Cloud
Let us help with your cloud transformation
If your organization is evaluating a move to the cloud, considering your first cloud-based ERP or CRM solution, or looking to move from on-premises, get in touch with the Kwixand Solutions team to see how we can help you. Kwixand Solutions is a Silver Microsoft Dynamics 365 Partner and implementation partner based in Vancouver, Canada, and we help businesses across Canada and the US digitally transform and achieve their goals. Book a free consultation with us today to get started.