Cloud Migration; the Pros and Cons

Cloud Services

Before technological revolution, Individuals and businesses were met with the challenges of storing and processing data and accessing this data through efficient and effective means, and at affordable cost too.

Fast forward to today.

Data can now be stored safely in something other than an in-house server and accessed by users irrespective of location, all thanks to Cloud Services.

The harvest from implementing cloud computing is bountiful. With cloud computing, businesses move closer to fulfilling their goal of making money with less operational cost. The financial burden that rides along with in-house data storage hardware is completely avoided as operational costs for power and other supporting infrastructure do not come into play.

Cloud services are wrongly perceived by some to be reserved for only large businesses and organisations.

They couldn’t be more wrong.

Company use of cloud-based services in the United Kingdom (UK) has seen an increase of 36 percent over a period of five years, with an adoption rate of 84 percent as of 2015.

The key attribute of cloud services is its scalability, this defeats the argument for maintaining onsite hardware and upgrading to larger servers when needs be as against migrating to cloud services one instance is a phone call away the other is an engineer’s time for a day and configuration for a further week.

For one, most of these small businesses cannot even afford the in-house severs required to comfortably contain the data and attempts to use below par storage equipment would lead to avoidable operational interruptions and downtime which would again incur unnecessary costs.

Cloud services permit businesses to pay for only what they use and upgrade accordingly along the way and as such caters for even the smallest of businesses with the level of service they require.

One of the significant benefits of cloud computing is its easy accessibility. Cloud services provide its users the ability to access data and cloud-based applications through secure and simple login portals over an internet connection regardless of their location. With cloud services, business operations need not be delayed and access to applications is fast tracked.

Though cloud computing comes with a great number of benefits, it also has its shortcomings with the most significant of them being downtime.

Cloud systems are quite reliable but even then, they are not immune to outages. 2013 saw major internet bigwigs such as Google and Amazon fall victim to these outages. Outages like these can happen to any business. It’s the preparation for such events and handling of what comes after that determines if the company recovers in one piece.

Security and privacy are also bugging issues that affects cloud-based systems (Ask HBO). Data security considerations are imperative in businesses as you will be committing vital details to your cloud providers.

These potential drawbacks of a cloud system can be worrisome but can also be handled effectively. The reality is that cloud working is extremely beneficial for small businesses and allows them to compete with larger companies providing have fail safes in place.

For Example,

With a flexible and scale-able backup solution, important data can easily be restored and businesses can be up and running in record time after disaster strikes.

A hybrid system comprising of VoIP and traditional landlines will keep your business connected despite any fall in connectivity.

Employ the use of replication servers in separate data centres. This strategy, though excessive, is quite effective. Once a server is replicated, it is synchronized in real-time and cuts downtime to a minimum.

Talk with us today to discover the benefits of the cloud as part of an effective IT strategy.