What does it mean to move a business to the cloud?
Moving to the cloud – it’s what all forward-thinking businesses are doing. And it’s what your business should be doing, too. Right? Well, before jumping on the bandwagon, it’s best to understand exactly what it means to move to the cloud and if it’s actually well-suited for your business’s needs.
Whether you’re new to the cloud or a long-time user – be it for personal or business reasons – most individuals have been exposed to the idea of storing or managing their data and applications on a virtual server. And as many might already know, the concept of the cloud isn’t a new one. For the most part, it’s just been stamped with a new name.
A brief history of the cloud
The first instances of cloud computing came about in the 1960s when large mainframe computers could be accessed remotely through “dumb” terminals that did not contain internal processing capabilities. At that time, the cloud was referred to as time-sharing. By allowing many individuals to share access to powerful, expensive computers, organizations could improve employee productivity by allowing users to submit computer jobs like check processing or manage airline reservations.
Since then, the cloud has been given a slew of different monikers, from time-sharing to client-server to grid computing. Regardless of the title, however, the popularity of the cloud is still based on some of the same drivers that caused its emergence more than 50 years ago.
Like their predecessors, today’s companies are looking to reduce their hardware, software and operational costs by becoming less reliant on in-house servers and the personnel required to manage them. Companies that provide cloud computing can provide a faster, more affordable service because they can amortize their costs over a large number of customers, whereby a single company can’t spread their overhead costs to that degree. If a service can be delivered cheaper, faster and of higher quality, why not use it?
Moving to the cloud, defined
Although it’s easy to understand the idea of moving data to the cloud, the idea of moving a business to a cloud isn’t as clear-cut. Taking the 30,000-foot view, moving to the cloud is the migration of hardware, software, services and operations from in-house to an off-premise cloud or SaaS-based service provider. It allows companies to focus technology budgets on competitive advantage rather than infrastructure.
More often than not, when a company moves to the cloud, they are saying a few things; infrastructure resides in the cloud, data is stored in the cloud, applications are deployed in the cloud and services are delivered from the cloud. Further, the cloud provider is responsible for the lion’s share of the work, including everything from hardware and software maintenance and upgrades, 24x365 monitoring and managed services, plus high availability and disaster recovery support for those companies that need a more industrial-strength, total solution.
It’s important to realize, however, that an entire business doesn’t have to move to the cloud. Often times, a company will only move over the elements of its business that make sense without creating any undue liabilities or burden.
To better understand what that means, it might be best to understand the overall goal of moving to the cloud, whether it’s an entire business or just those applications or services that make sense to operate off-premise without increasing risks. Primarily, both the short- and long-term objectives are (a) cost containment; (b) allowing an IT department to become more focused on building the business than to administer the business.
For example, when an eCommerce company’s site is hosted on the cloud, like using the Amazon Webstore service, a business can quickly deploy a site without the worry of whether its in-house infrastructure can support and manage it. More importantly, it also allows the IT team focus on more strategic tasks that provide a more positive user experience that enhances the brand.
The same is true with many tag-based SaaS applications, such as Adobe’s Test and Target, a business tool that requires minimal commitment from the IT department. Many of these tag-based applications can be managed by the marketing team without the need to call for help from the IT folks.
On the flip side of that coin, however, for eCommerce sites that have already built in a fair amount of customization, a cloud-based service might not make sense. Cloud or SaaS service providers make their money by minimizing the changes to the application they host and manage. They control costs by limiting software changes to cookie-cutter templates. That's good for them, but restricts the flexibility of how a business can market their site.
When a business uses a combination of public and private cloud resources as well as SaaS services mixed with in-house applications, the term might better be referred to as “moving to a hybrid cloud.” To take a closer look at this blended type of environment, stay tuned. We’ll cover the topic in a future blog.
To learn more about how to manage tag-based applications and how they ease the IT department’s workload:
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