6 REASONS TO MOVE TO THE CLOUD
In recent years, the term "cloud computing" has become much more than just a buzz word. In fact, Microsoft Azure are currently 10,000 new customers every week! If you've not yet considered moving to the cloud, we encourage you to continue reading about the main benefits of Azure (Microsoft's cloud platform):
1.VARIABLE COSTS VS. FIXED COSTS
On-premise servers are expensive. Whether it’s the initial investment or the ongoing maintenance cost, your on-premise server is likely to be burning a hole in the company pocket, even whilst you sleep!...
Consider a company with a Test & Development team that require substantial resources from 9am to 5pm (Monday through Friday). A large on-premise server will provide the correct level of resources needed for the team to work efficiently during working hours, but what happens to the resources over evenings and weekends?...They are still there, so the company are still paying for them.
When you consider that a standard 5 day working week consists of 40 hours, yet there are 168 hours in a 7 day week, you could argue that the resources are being wasted for 76% of their total lifespan.
With Azure the costs are variable. There are no large initial investments required, and no wasted expenses (if properly configured for your business). You’ll only pay for the resources you need: where you need them, when you need them.
2. REMOVE THE GUESS WORK FOR REQUIRED RESOURCES
Until cloud services came along, estimating the level of resources that are truly required has been a balancing act:
- Underestimating the amount of resources leads to a poor customer experience.
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Overestimating the resources needed leads to unnecessary, unjustified expense.
Azure affords you the best of both worlds: A great customer experience with no wasted expense. With Azure you’ll have the ability to scale up your resources when you need them, and scale down when you don’t. So whether you’re running a planned seasonal promotion, or you receive some unexpected press coverage, you can rest assured in the knowledge that extra resources are just a click away.
3. LOWER COSTS
According to a report by Gartner, if $1 could buy approximately 1GB of storage with an on-premise server. The same amount of storage would cost just 3 cents in the cloud! Whether you’re interested in the solution that offers the lowest cost or one that provides the highest cost efficiency, Azure comes out on top, every time.
We’ve already talked about initial setup cost and surplus wastage costs, but what about the costs involved with innovation? Consider a scenario where your organisation are starting a new digital service offering: In order to run trials of the service you’ll have to buy additional infrastructure long before you could be 100% confident that the new service is going to be profitable for your business. Whilst that was a bullet you’d have to bite in pastimes, it’s no longer a strategy that makes good business sense. It’s now much more cost efficient to spin up a trial environment in Azure, and if it’s not profitable you can pull the plug without crippling the bank.
4. INCREASE SPEED AND AGILITY
As we’ve already mentioned, when building a server environment, or adding to an existing environment you can’t always be sure of your exact upgrade requirements.
With azure you’re able to build a fully-fledged resource environment in a matter of days, compared to the weeks it would usually take to build an on-premise environment. Research has shown that this development approach will provide a 40-60% cost saving, whilst also allowing you to fail frequently and innovate rapidly, allowing you to find the most suitable configuration for your business without delay.
5. IMPROVE OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY AND ELIMINATE THE FEAR OF DATA LOSS
Azure is a managed service: Software updates, hardware upgrades, and ongoing general maintenance is performed by Microsoft in the background. This eliminates many of the costs associated with the time spent troubleshooting problems that arise.
What about Data recovery?
Whilst the vast majority of businesses already have a data recovery plan in place, for many businesses, transferring the data from one location to another is often a manual process.
Azure automatically makes multiple copies of your data. In fact, at any one time, the same piece of data is stored on multiple disks across two different data centres.
Still concerned about losing you data?
Each of the 19 datacentres across the globe consist of 16 buildings, and each building is the size of a football pitch. These buildings are spread up to 25 miles apart from each other, ensuring that your data is robust enough to survive in the event of a natural disaster.
6. GLOBAL REACH
Azure has a huge global network infrastructure, and no matter where you are in the world, those datacentres are available on tap.
If you want to offer your customers the best possible experience, you’ll need to deliver information to them quickly. Multinational organisations are taking advantage of Azure services in order to achieve just that. In fact, many large organisations choose to deliver their website services from the USA datacentre for the first half of the day, and from the Japanese datacentre for the second half (following the movement of the sun as the demand for resource heightens during in daylight hours).
There are a million other reasons to invest in Azure. Here are just a couple:
- 50% of fortune 500 companies are using azure
- 70% of CIOs want a cloud approach by 2016
- Azure is developing rapidly – over 750 new features have been added in a 12 month period
- Monthly SLA of 99.99% uptime.
Want to talk about moving to the cloud?... Get in touch now.
