Why You Should Migrate Application to the Cloud ?

From DevOps to DR, there's a lot to consider before migrating an app to the cloud.  Cloud computing (also known as on-demand computing) has become a major buzzword in the business world these last few years. To put it in the simplest terms, it is a way to use computing services over the Internet.

Instead of your company maintaining its own hardware, that hardware is available to you as a service you access over the Internet. The service is also responsible for storing and protecting your data.The kinds of services offered by cloud computing providers usually belong to one of the 3 broad groups: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS).

You know what cloud-computing is, and probably have a sense that it could benefit your business. But can you think of reasons to use it in your shop? Here's my list: 

Upcoming hardware refresh requiring large budget: Most capex purchases and hardware refreshes are closely scrutinized today. The cost of buying datacenter hardware (servers, storage, networking gear) especially for non-mission critical applications is being compared to the extremely low cost and pay-as-you go model of the public cloud equivalent. Sophisticated IT managers know that while the capital cost of hardware is only 24%, with operational and software accounting for almost 70% of the ownership costs . Many enterprises are opting to move their workloads and run them on the cloud to avoiding costly hardware refresh cycles.

Upcoming data center lease renewal: Tight budgets are making it hard to justify having your infrastructure in too many or expensive data centers. CIOs with high capital expenses arelooking for cost savings in reducing the number of data centers or at least reducing their footprint in leased data centers. Frequently, data centers that are hosting a secondary environment (for business continuity/disaster recovery) come under tight scrutiny. Cloud IaaS can replace a secondary data center that is expensive and requires high maintenance. Many enterprises start evaluating the migration of their workloads at least a year before their upcoming lease renewal.

Cost Savings: Another target for cost savings is workloads with low utilisation. These could consist of physical server environments, or workloads with cyclical utilisation where business demands picks up during certain times of the month or year. Rather than over provision the environment with expensive infrastructure, the on-premises environment can be provisioned for average usage, while taking advantage of the cloud for peak usage.

Improved availability/recoverability: Here workloads can fall into two categories: i) mission critical apps that need a low Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of hours rather than days can leverage the significantly lower recoverability time using a cloud than traditional DR or backup; and ii) critical apps that require business continuity but have not been protected due to the high expense of traditional disaster recovery solutions. Here, customers are still running their workloads in their data center, but have selected the cloud for their secondary environment. They may also be using alternatives such as AWS Direct Connect for increased performance and lower latency.

Leverage new PaaS stack: Some enterprises are shifting their dev/ops environment from on-premises to a cloud-based Platform As A Service model for development and release agility, enhanced collaboration, standardization and both opex and capex savings over maintaining their own infrastructure and development environment. Using Azure for .NET application development is an example of such a shift from on-premises to cloud.

Business growing faster than IT can support: Some high growth businesses feel constrained by on-premises infrastructure and IT resources available to support the scale and agility needed to meet their customer needs and hence the urgent need to shift their existing workloads to the cloud. In many cases, the workloads are also re-factored to take advantage of cloud native services.