Cloud Migration
Cloud services have been one of the biggest talks in town for several years now – and yet, a lot of companies are unable to take advantage of the cloud. The COVID-19 situation has switched the gears, setting a higher pace for digitization and remote connections. But, there is also a significant profit hidden in the cloud, estimated by some experts to be as high as one trillion dollars.
In a few more years, the majority of big businesses expect to spend approximately 4/5 of their IT hosting budget on various cloud options. Given the variety of options you can go to, such various “X as a service” offers and private clouds, achieving this goal will be no mere feat. Employing the help of cloud migration services certainly helps to make the process sting only a little.
Yes, it won’t be all fine and dandy for everyone; a lot of businesses will spend their time chasing the brand-new IT dream of a perfectly efficient cloud, bleeding money in progress. In fact, the costs of cloud migration is one of the biggest factors stifling the adoption of it for many enterprises.
We did mention the COVID-19 pandemic before; still, the cloud had already gained significant attention before 2020. The only difference is higher priority put on the cloud thanks to the need for consistent remote access and higher product demand.
As an example, let’s take the fast-food industry. Say, we have an imaginary BurgerDee chain in Colorado, dutifully working on 50 to 60,000 online orders a day. Then the pandemic begins, everyone is safely barricaded at home with their lifetime supply of hand sanitizers, and suddenly BurgerDee is getting 450,000 orders a day.
They choose to handle the skyrocketing demand with their old server hidden in lead janitor Jim’s closet. In a few days, Jim will have to start looking for a new job when the server inevitably burns down.
Then we have their rivaling fast-food chain SubwaySnacks whose owners decided to move the whole e-commerce and ordering system into the cloud just two months before the pandemic. Sure, their services are still buggy, their development team is still getting used to the freshly acquired cloud optimization tools, but the company can reap the profits steadily without a significant interruption and speed up their cloud migration.
Additionally, their senior janitor Randall still has a closet all to himself and can bring Jim into their team. You go, Randall and Jim, you go.
Imaginary restaurants aside, legacy solutions are always a difficult thing to maintain for both the developers and the management, cutting deep into the company’s budget. This also contributed to the almost universal desire to move to the cloud in record terms.
However, it is always important to remember that migration is a bumpy road that requires heavy planning. Diving into the migration unprepared may increase the expenses drastically. Additionally, the workload is easy to underestimate. Businesses all around the world reported an average 14% of extra expenses during the migration process, adding up to a grand total of over $100 billion in just three years.
Still, the future looks bright. In the next three years, we expect an annual 40 percent growth in funds spent on vertical applications (e.g. risk management services) in the cloud. Horizontal applications, such as customer relationship management, are also projected to experience a ~25 percent annual growth.
The cloud also promises unexpected benefits that may transform the business processes in any given company. Going from a local, high-maintenance system to a cloud service drastically increases scalability and opens new markets.
