When speaking of Cloud migrations, the common talking points often center around reducing capital expenses and improving infrastructure reliability. But as a technical leader, is that what should truly drive you towards adopting public Cloud solutions in 2024? Let's explore the top benefits of the Cloud, which are indispensable for the success of most organizations.
Embrace Agility
In this context, agility isn't just about deploying Agile methodologies – although you can explore those at STX Next’s Agile Center of Excellence. Here, we're focusing on agility in setting up, modifying, and decommissioning your IT systems. Historically, turning business ideas into IT solutions required significant upfront investment. You had to procure servers or ask your IT team to provision virtual machines, often necessitating additional licensing. With the Cloud, you can get up and running without these overhead activities.
Moreover, if you discover during the development phase that your chosen approach or technology isn’t the best fit, the Cloud allows you to pivot effortlessly. Even if the new approach requires an entirely different infrastructure, it's all more manageable in the Cloud environment.
And if your new product doesn't meet expectations, you can simply deactivate the underlying infrastructure and move on to other value-driven projects. Too often, we've seen underperforming products kept alive, presented as successes just to justify the large initial investments they required.
Use the Expertise of Industry Giants
Building from scratch and finding new ways to optimize your cloud expenses can be exciting. However, we've often seen teams get distracted by complex engineering projects and lose focus on delivering value to customers or internal teams.
One of the major benefits of using public cloud services is access to well-developed, reliable solutions. While these services might not always be the cheapest or the most powerful, they work well for most applications. These solutions are built on years of experience from expert engineering teams at cloud providers, who have tested and perfected them with thousands of customers worldwide.
Such services allow you to deliver business value quickly and then focus on making improvements. It’s much easier to ask for an additional budget for further development if you already have a working solution in place. You can then pinpoint and apply optimizations to cut costs or improve the customer experience.
Enhance Cybersecurity
A couple of years ago, concerns about public Cloud data security were rampant. Today, as businesses amass larger and more insightful datasets, the stakes are higher than ever.
Internally, we challenge ourselves with this question: can we realistically achieve better security measures with our on-premises infrastructure and a small engineering team, compared to what Cloud providers offer with their extensive talent? The likely answer is no.
However, Cloud security operates on a shared responsibility model. While Cloud providers offer robust security measures, it's up to you to ensure your side of the equation is secure. Think of it as standing on the shoulders of giants – it takes effort to balance on them as they move forward.
Why Should You Adopt Cloud?
These top three benefits – agility, leveraging industry expertise, and enhanced cybersecurity – may not be groundbreaking, but their staying power underlines their significance. Periodically reassessing why we're adopting these Cloud solutions is vital.
You might hear about the powerful capabilities of infrastructure as code within the Cloud, or how you can swiftly develop solutions using emerging control planes. However, these capabilities are extensions of the foundational benefits we've discussed.
---
Need help navigating your Cloud journey? STX Next can guide you in embracing these powerful Cloud advantages. Contact us today to ensure your Cloud strategy is optimized for success.
