Cloud computing has been getting an astounding amount of attention because of the flexibility and cost savings it can deliver. Cloud computing means high utilization and smoothing of the inevitable peaks and troughs in workloads. In the Cloud your workloads will share server infrastructure, allowing the cloud computing provider to optimize the hardware needs of its data centers, which means lower costs for you. Here are five simple workloads you can move to the cloud.
- Backups – Moving backups offsite to the cloud is the first logical step in beginning your cloud journey. you have the flexibility to start backups small and scale as needed. If you are concerned about moving mission critical data to the cloud, start with a less risky environment for test and dev and then move more workloads offsite as your confidence builds. Gone are the days when an outage or hardware failure causes massive data loss. Today, the cloud ensures that your data integrity is kept in tact, even in the event of an outage. Easily restore backups from the cloud to achieve specific recovery point objectives and get your team back online.
- Disaster Recovery – The next logical workload to move to the cloud is Disaster Recovery (DR). With the extreme cost of building out and maintaining your own infrastructure for a DR site, the cloud presents a much more cost effective solution. Having a disaster recovery plan in place is considered a best practice of business continuity. However, time, money and the expertise hold back most small to medium-sized business from installing their own disaster recovery. Outsourcing DR to a cloud provider eliminates all these worries. If there is a disaster, service providers have the network and man power to move your data to another location seamlessly – you won’t even notice the difference.
- Email Services – Having email in the cloud seems like a no brainer. but many businesses are still utilizing in house email servers. The immediate issue presented with an in house server is its lack of scalability. Every company wants to grow, but growth can stretch your IT to the limit. With more employees comes an increasing amount of email users and mailbox sizes. Ongoing maintenance can be an overwhelming task, but it doesn’t have to be difficult. The benefits of moving email to the cloud can eliminate maintenance tasks, equipment purchases and manpower.
- Desktops – With the workforce becoming increasingly mobile, Desktop as a Service has gained in popularity. By moving desktops and applications to the cloud, rather than an internally deployed and managed data center, businesses can realize all the promised benefits of virtualization desktops—centralized management, improved data security and simplified deployment— while avoiding exorbitant costs, limitations and hassles. This means that IT staff can standardize desktop deployments and security measures without having to touch a device!
- Testing and Development (Test/Dev) – Meeting project deadlines is hard enough for strapped IT teams. Add in the provisioning of an on premises test and dev environment and delays are sure to follow. IT and development teams are being asked to develop and deliver higher quality software more often, and to be more responsive to business needs. For development and testing, the challenge is that the infrastructure that is on site has a limited capacity and ability while working in an environment with a high demand. By moving dev/test to the cloud, IT teams have the flexibility of resources that can reduce cost, improve quality, efficiencies, in meeting those tight deadlines. Not to mention the ability to spin up environments in a matter of minutes.
Though it seems to be that most IT processes are moving to the cloud these days, there are some use cases that are easier and more cost-effective to implement than others. In fact, do you see a trend above? The main benefit to moving to the cloud is cost optimization and time efficiencies. The large amount of capital that would be invested in hardware, software and labor would shift to a pay-as-you-use scenario. Moving to the cloud makes good business sense.