Cloud Migration: Benefits and Risks of Moving To The Cloud
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Even in 2017, CIO’s are evaluating the benefits of switching their business operations to the cloud. Making the transformation to cloud business operations is a decision that will have to be justified and defended for years to come. As of yet, there has been no knock-out blow in the debate between the cloud and the in-house server. There’s plenty to be said for both, which ultimately makes the question…
What’s right for your business?
Sure, the chance to dump your servers and outsource to someone steeped in server management seems like a gift from the IT gods. You’ll also free up a ton of space and possibly open up budget to move in that new office senior management has been dreaming of.
The arguments in favor of cloud computing are easy to make, especially to someone frustrated by the intellectual overhead and raw cost of maintaining their own servers.
The value proposition of the cloud includes the following.
- You pay only for what you use, so it’s incredibly flexible; you can scale up or down at will.
- Security, upgrading, and server configuration are in the hands of experts.
In these days of everything being “as-a-service,” the idea of owning anything like a server seems downright old-fashioned. If Lyft can run the world’s largest taxi service without owning any taxis, why on earth would you need to own servers?

The leader in cloud infrastructure at the moment is Amazon Web Services or AWS. AWS groups its Infrastructure as a Service offerings into the four categories of Compute, Storage and Content Delivery, Database, and Networking. All of those resources are used subject to Amazon’s security and identity services, which include Amazon hosted Active Directory, AWS Identity Management, AWS Certificate manager for managing SSL/TLS certificates, and even hardware-based key storage and management through AWS CloudHSM. You can monitor your infrastructure resource usage through management tools like Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Cloudtrail for tracking user activity and API usage, and AWS Config for tracking resource inventory and changes.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud computing platform that offers an array of services in 190 countries worldwide. From websites to big data to DevOps, AWS offers a multitude of solutions for nearly any application. It works well for different industries and it provides IT infrastructure services online. The main benefit from utilizing cloud computing is the opportunity to pay for infrastructure expenses as you scale rather than having to pay up-front. This allows businesses to only pay for what they need and gradually increase demand as the business grows. Here is a list of six benefits of amazon web services.
AWS focuses on offering an easy solution that is quickly and securely hosted. Amazon continuously improves upon problems and creates innovative solutions to make it faster and simpler for users. For example, they have created the Amazon Relational Database Services (RDS) in response to the difficulty of managing databases.
Amazon Web Services has an average of 64% reduction in total cost of ownership.
From operating system to programming languages, with AWS you’re able to select the option that best fits your needs. You have control over the virtual environment from which you can load software as well as the services your application requires. This setup allows easy migration for existing applications and paves the way for building new solutions simultaneously.
The AWS model benefits companies that start small and cannot afford large up-front costs. With no long-term commitments, you only pay for the resources you use. From compute power to storage, you only pay for what you use.
Hundreds of thousands have been using Amazon Web Services for over a decade. Their global and diverse presence enables them to “spin up hundreds or thousands of servers in minutes and deliver faster results” (AWS). They offer a secure global computing infrastructure and are a spinoff of Amazon’s multi-billion dollar online business.
When your business is growing, AWS scales with you. On the other hand, it is possible to scale down during off-seasons or slow times.
One example of a successful AWS migration is Hess. Hess switched to AWS Direct Connect with a 1Gbps connection for more consistent network performance. According to Amazon, Hess migrated approximately 300 servers to AWS in the US East (Northern Virginia) Region. Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) attached to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances provides block level storage for almost 500 TB of data. Provisioned IOPS volumes for storage in conjunction with instances optimized for EBS provide consistent and low-latency performance for servers with more strenuous IO demands. In extreme cases, provisioned IOPS volumes were configured as a RAID array to increase performance.
Switching to the cloud is also attractive when evaluating risk mitigation or disaster recovery. An example, Unilever stores backup data, snapshots, product and recipe media files in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and uses EBS Snapshot Copy to copy Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) snapshots from the US East (Northern Virginia) Region to the US West (Northern California) Region.

On the contrary, there are a few things you need to factor in to make sure you’re comfortable with any potential compromises.
Power: Cloud providers can’t match the power of a dedicated server that’s properly configured.
Speed: The scalability of the cloud has to do with getting more or less storage, not faster storage, which might be a concern when another customer is flogging the server you’re on.
Latency: If your cloud host uses dispersed locations or it’s not nearby, you might have latency issues.
Cloud computing is most clearly seen in companies with a tight budget, unpredictable growth potential, and b2c consumer business models.
A company that has a b2b model or has well-established usage needs and predictable growth will likely find running its own servers cheaper and more efficient.
This is something you can quickly run the numbers on, and the results might surprise you, considering that “cheaper” is the main value proposition of the cloud industry.
It’s also worth running the decision through the filter of security. It’s critical to know the security measures in place at your cloud provider to ensure you are improving your level of security, not reducing it.
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