By now, everyone is on board with the benefits of migrating to the cloud.
A cloud infrastructure brings many software-development benefits, including the ability to grow or shrink resources in real time. Navigating data to the cloud also delivers benefits in terms of reducing IT storage costs, while providing substantial scalability and flexibility to operational functionality.
While information governance risks are inherent with some cloud solutions, securing a reliable, trusted cloud partner with expertise in developing a cloud migration roadmap ideal for your business requirements is the smart way to ensure your cloud implementation goes well, whether Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) or Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is the goal.
For businesses looking to enact a successful cloud deployment, many concerns exist, ranging from data management and integration worries to data compliance concerns, records retention compliance issues, information security, risk management and, of course, vendor transparency. For some companies, risks to sensitive Personally Identifiable Information (PII) are of critical importance – signaling an even greater demand to migrate to the cloud with the right cloud partner.
According to a global research firm McKinsey, enterprises’ adoption of IaaS as the primary environment for workloads will jump from 10% in 2015 to 51% in 2018. McKinsey data asserts that more of today’s enterprises are planning to reduce their reliance on on-premise traditional and virtualized environments and increase their reliance on cloud platforms.
McKinsey reports that in 2015, 77% of enterprises used traditionally built IT infrastructure as the primary environment for at least one workload; by 2018, this will drop to 43%. Enterprises also plan to scale back their reliance on virtualized workloads from 67% in 2015 to 57% in 2018.
Conversely, per McKinsey, virtual private clouds are expected to gain 20% more of the primary workloads from enterprise IT, increasing from 34% in 2015 to 54% in 2018. Dedicated private clouds are predicted to increase from 38% of workloads to 57% by 2018, a 19% increase. Public-based IaaS is also expected to increase from 25% in 2015 to 37% in 2018, a 12% increase.
Cloud Migration Requires the Right Cloud Partner
Cloud migration can be daunting, involving experts not only in IT, but in risk management, change management and information security. Moving applications requires the intelligent transfer of an organization’s critical digital assets, residing on premises, to move to the cloud. There will be obstacles. There must be strategic planning. A cloud migration roadmap should be developed so that all key stakeholders in the cloud migration process understand what data is going to the cloud – and what isn’t.
Selecting the right cloud provider and services that align with your current organization needs and goals, is essential to maximizing the full benefits of cloud computing. For more background information to help with selecting the right cloud provider for your business needs, download the free cloud guide.