When creating the most effective data solution for your organization, it’s critical to focus on your specific business needs and goals. Often, organizations with on-premises data centers face challenges such as costly maintenance issues, limited resources and a lack of competitive edge. In these situations — and many others — moving your data to the cloud is imperative for success in today’s competitive marketplace.
With a continued increase in companies moving to the cloud, you may know that it’s time for your business to begin that transition as well. However, you may have questions about the process, including where to begin.
Here are four important questions to ask before your organization begins moving to the cloud:
Question #1: What Computing Trends Are Driving Organizations to the Cloud?
There are six cloud computing trends driving cloud migrations for many organizations.
Companies are implementing cloud computing because they are...
1. Bridging the Gap
As data storage technologies evolve, they’re moving closer together and becoming more specialized. Now, more resources are being used than ever before in order to manage, maintain and optimize on-premises resources, which is costing organizations that aren’t moving to the cloud.
By moving to the cloud, businesses are bridging this gap and have the ability to quickly move the data they need to the cloud, increase efficiency and customize their data solution. In many cases, it takes weeks or even months to deploy a new server in an on-premise environment. There are many known supply shortages and volatility in the market currently. This can be done in a few minutes in a cloud environment.
2. Switching Expense Models
Moving your data center to the cloud can give your organization the ability to switch expense models when it comes to your data solutions. With an on-premises solution, you’re dealing with a long-term capital expenditure model, which can cause you to spend more money than you need to, based on your current needs.
With cloud computing, you transition to a more fluid expense model that ebbs and flows along with your business. Switching to this model allows you to pay as you go, only pay for what you need and make the most of your available resources.
3. Future-Proofing
Companies are leveraging the cloud to solve their immediate needs and to set themselves up for future success. While current needs are critical, organizations now have the ability to look ahead and understand how their data needs may change.
In addition, this gives businesses more opportunity to take advantage of new technology, including from key innovators, such as Google.
4. Avoiding Risk
In any computing environment, there’s always a risk when corporate data is placed outside of your company’s safeguards.
In addition to offering many tools that can help your IT team track unauthorized applications and extensions and individual user usage, the cloud offers stronger protection against unmitigated shadow IT risks and other security concerns.
5. Discovering ROI Benefits
While there are many benefits of moving to the cloud, this is often one of the most critical for businesses.
Moving one or two high visibility applications early on in the migration process allows for a higher return on investment (ROI) while your organization is moving to the cloud. These applications typically are your high-usage systems — and by putting them into the cloud, they enter the scalable, pay-as-you-go model to help you effectively manage costs.
6. Discovering Where to Start
Many companies want to leverage the cloud, but don’t know where to begin their cloud migration. Remember that you don’t have to try and replace your entire data center on day one; it’s important to take it one step at a time, following a strategy that’s specific to your organization’s needs.
While migrating and modernizing in the cloud is a crucial step for your business to take, you don’t have to do it alone. Working with cloud computing experts can ensure a seamless transition for moving your data center to the cloud.
Question #2: What Are Some Challenges With On-Premise Data Centers?
Cost
On-premise data solutions come with many costs, including managing the servers, hiring employees who keep the servers running, securing your infrastructure, updating the patch system and more. Clearly, there are significant upfront costs and many that continue throughout the lifespan of the infrastructure, creating an excessive total cost of ownership (TCO) that organizations have to budget for year after year.
Time
Any time spent managing on-premise data centers is time you’re not spending on your business functions. By moving to the cloud, you can reduce infrastructure-related resources and allow your IT department to spend more time innovating new ideas for the business.
Competition
With on-premise data centers, you don’t have the competitive advantage you need to stay ahead in today’s market.
The cloud allows you to quickly shift or expand your infrastructure. For example, if you need to stand up 30, 40, 50 or 1,000 servers in a day, you can do that in the cloud. Instead of waiting for provisioning or capital approval, you can scale on demand with cloud infrastructure.
Limited Access to Analytics
Not being able to effectively use your data can cause direct limitations for both businesses and their end-users.
For example, an organization with delayed processing times may not be able to have a quick view of their customers or their insights about them, causing the customer to look for competitors with similar services. While this is a business frustration for many organizations, it can be crucial for those in certain industries, including healthcare.
Risk of Using Inaccurate Data
With multiple sources of data coming into your organization, you want a strategy that allows you to gather, evaluate, and ensure the accuracy of your data.
By adding logic and other parameters to your incoming data, you can centralize it to create a single source of truth (SSOT). With an SSOT, you can provide accurate, outgoing information that can be used by your organization to make data-driven decisions.
Question #3: What Is the Business Impact and ROI for Organizations Moving to the Cloud?
There are several key advantages of moving to the cloud, and organizations want to see them as quickly as possible. In order to make this happen, your team may decide to move one or two high visibility applications early on, allowing for a much higher ROI, as well as increased buy-in from others within your organization. By showing them the benefits the cloud can provide, they’re likely to be more engaged with the transition.
Once your cloud migration is complete, you'll be able to monitor systems and identify candidates for automation and containerization. You can use the data generated to glean insights to drive additional cost reduction, which can help you make informed decisions on where to spend your IT dollars.
Question #4: What Does Moving to the Cloud Look Like?
At Onix, we focus on a proven three-phased customer journey to help businesses accelerate the migration and modernization of database and analytics workloads to the broadest set of managed and modern database and analytics services on the cloud in just weeks.
Assess
In this first phase, we examine your current infrastructure, your needs and your business goals. In addition, we’ll review your on-premise resources, data, and anything else that may impact your modernization journey.
Mobilize
Next, we work to enable migration and modernization at scale for your business. We also begin addressing any gaps uncovered in the assessment phase and help upskill your workforce through training and workshops.
Migrate
Finally, we migrate and accelerate the implementation of your workloads in order to optimize your infrastructure environment so your organization can enjoy the benefits of cloud computing.
Take Your Business to the Next Level With Data Modernization
Outdated legacy managed systems can be detrimental to your business, but the right migration and modernization strategy can transform your organization and help you keep up with our ever-evolving digital landscape.
By getting started with a cloud migration partner, you can ensure your strategy is effectively created and implemented.
Here at Onix, we have over a decade of experience helping clients manage change, increase security, deploy features faster and retain talent. We can help you modernize your applications by building them in containers or as a serverless architecture. This will save your team time that is usually associated with the undifferentiated heavy lifting that is required to manage infrastructure. This will give your IT organization more time to focus on your applications and innovations for your business.
Contact us today to get started on your modernization journey!
