Debunking 3 Myths of the Cloud

Cloud adoption has been embraced by companies with 94% using some form of cloud computing in their operations in 2022. One of the best business decisions organisations can currently make is to no longer contribute to leases on large and expensive data centres and instead, kick-start cloud migration. However, despite the perks, many are still hesitant to make the switch.

Why? Because of three common myths around cloud migration:

·       Myth 1: Cloud migration won’t save my company money

·       Myth 2: Cloud migration requires additional maintenance

·       Myth 3: There’s no performance benefit to cloud migration

Myth 1: Cloud migration won’t save me money

Businesses are hesitant to adopt the cloud as they do not believe it will result in significant cost-savings. The alternative choice to the cloud is to store data in a physical data centre. However, what businesses fail to realise is that data centres require the customer to pay in full. Even if the storage space purchase is not maximised. Not only this, often a licence agreement is required, too, which contributes to the cost. In contrast, with the cloud, you only pay for what you use and there are multiple plan options available to allow your business to run flexibility and efficiently.

Furthermore, there is no cost of real estate or soft costs associated to the cloud that there are with a physical database. The 2022 Cloud Computing Survey from Foundry found that 60% of companies agree that cloud capabilities helped them achieve increased and sustainable revenue in the last year. Not only does the cloud cuts costs, but it has shown to increase revenue too.

Myth 2: Cloud migration requires additional maintenance

The second reason why businesses won’t make the switch is because they do not believe that they are equipped with the correct skills set to manage the cloud, with 96% of IT decision makers citing that they experienced difficulties implementing their cloud strategy. Whilst it is true that the cloud is different to on-site data centres and that some new skills are expected to be adopted, the cloud is much easier to run than a physical data centre.

This is because data centres require manual work to run in order to encrypt data at rest and in transit, to define port allowances and prepare for compliance audits. But manual work is unreliable because it is more susceptible to human error, which puts businesses who need to protect sensitive data they handle at great risk. It is reported that 57% of data centre outages are the result of human error.

The cloud, however, minimises this human error as a physical network is no longer present, and therefore, does not require maintenance. Instead, you would use identity and access permissions as the line of defence to protect important data from cyber threats and hacks. The cloud is more reliable and enables employees to work on more high-level business tasks, rather than spending time on painstaking, and mundane manual work.

Myth 3: There is no performance benefit to cloud migration

This is could not be further from the truth.

The cloud has on demand scalability and the ability to re-factor existing applications, databases, and workloads for platform services (PaaS) and software solutions (SaaS). Utilising SaaS allows you to avoid the need to maintain servers as you can use a pay per use model as your business expands or decreases in size. The cloud has created platform services to support the development and maintenance of web applications without needing to patch and update operating systems. This means that the cloud always holds the most recent and stable system so your infrastructure is always up to date.

Time for change

The cloud offers a much more persuasive and innovative path than physical -data centres. Cloud-native solutions allow businesses to elevate database performance to the next level seamlessly and is cost-efficient. In addition, with correct planning you can avoid common pitfalls to ensure your cloud-native journey meets expectations.  If you plan for the change, have open discussions with stakeholders and design the migration to match business goals and other benefits of the cloud, such as PaaS and SaaS services, you will be successful in your data centre to cloud migration.