Changing the way you’ve been doing something for years is never easy and often scary for some. However, change is often necessary and can be very positive. In IT many things change rapidly while other things change very slowly. Until recently, the idea of having your servers locked away in a data center you control, or at least access, gave people a lot of comfort. With the advent of the cloud, the concept of having a server you can touch and feel is going away, but the anxiety of migrating workloads to a new location remains. Moving to the cloud isn’t an easy feat, but following the right approach can keep the gremlins away.
Most of our clients are aware of the benefits of adopting the cloud, but many still have some reluctance to take advantage of the many benefits. After many years of guiding companies of all sizes to the cloud, we know the fears you have and want you to know that moving to the cloud isn’t scary. Let’s talk about the tricks to moving to the cloud so you can focus on the treats of cloud migration.
Moving to the cloud fear: security measures
Security is usually the biggest fear we hear when a company is considering a cloud migration. If you think about it, a data breach could happen anywhere, including a data center. However, if your organization understands the shared responsibility security model of the major public cloud providers and takes the appropriate steps, there isn’t much to fear.
For many SMBs, the security measures offered by cloud providers is often better than what you could afford on your own. Cloud providers have a team of security professionals working to protect what’s in their network. The level of network and storage security used to enable multi-tenancy at public cloud providers is beyond what many small to mid-sized organizations could dream of building on their own. Imagine multi-tiered security systems that use Artificial Intelligence to both detect and respond to attacks and you understand why it’s those who don’t adopt the cloud who have the most to fear.
Moving to the cloud fear: monthly recurring charges
The way cloud consumption is billed can ultimately save your organization money. Though there are up-front migration costs associated with moving to the cloud, the cost of maintaining the environment, as well as the other benefits associated with cloud migration should improve your ROI. In addition, cloud providers make it possible for companies to shrink or grow your environment on the fly allowing for you to respond to changes in demand. If you don’t need your file servers running while things are going bump in the night, then simply have them set to run only during business hours. The dynamic ability of the cloud to scale is one of the biggest benefits to most businesses.
When you work with a knowledgeable cloud adoption partner like WSM, you can develop the right migration plan that will ensure that your adoption will ultimately return dividends long-term.
Moving to the cloud fear: organizational disruption
Many companies consider a lack of expertise to be one of the biggest challenges in adopting the cloud. Investing in training can eliminate disruption for employees. The key is to start early.
There are ways to build out a cloud environment and migrate to it without disrupting the productivity of the team. Depending on your current environment, your cloud environment could look almost identical so the learning curve is minimized.
Moving to the cloud fear: outages
When organizations give up control and put their faith into the hands of a provider, there is a fear of no longer being able to access the data due to outages or other problems. It is true that an outage could happen and we know that this can impact business. However, an outage could happen on-premise as well. The key difference is in the amount of support staff you have to address outages. The major public cloud providers – AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud – all promise 99% or more monthly uptime, while on-premise, self-hosted systems often are dependent on your own resources to maintain.
Moving to the cloud fear: losing data
Wondering if your information is safe is a common cloud concern. The fear that modern disaster recovery techniques aren’t good enough is unfounded. Major public cloud providers offer customers disaster recovery services that cost less than traditional DR. Some providers even promise 11 9’s (99.999999999%) data durability, meaning you have more to fear from Frankenstein than data loss!
Moving to the cloud can bring many benefits to businesses: increased connectivity and accessibility; cutting costs; better data recovery; faster time to scale, etc. We help businesses create cloud migration strategies that meet their unique goals and can help you choose the right path for your business. Embracing the cloud doesn’t have to be spooky. Contact us today to get started!
