The Cloud Computing market is continuing to grow rapidly, driven in no small part by the recent shift to remote working and the advent of AI. According to Goldman Sachs, Cloud’s compound annual growth rate (CAGR) is set to grow by 22% by 2030, reaching $2 trillion by the end of the decade. It is becoming clear that Cloud is no longer a disruptor, but is becoming a business necessity.
But does this mean that you should jump to a Cloud-first business model?
It’s the latest and greatest way of doing things and with Cloud adoption rates continuing to grow, the temptation is to follow suit and make the jump. But while the benefits of Cloud are well versed: flexibility, scalability, simplified security management and reduced CapEx being among the headline advantages, it of course comes down to your specific business needs. You need to make the IT fit.
Consider whether you have computing workloads that are of a sensitive nature, or you have obligations related to data sovereignty – particularly relevant in industries such as finance, legal and healthcare. In these circumstances, the potential geographic ambiguity of a Cloud Infrastructure could bring compliance issues. That said, this doesn’t mean you need to rule out Cloud as a suitable platform. While a Public Cloud Model could leave you high and dry with a fail-over to another part of the world, a Private Cloud Infrastructure would give you greater control over where your data resides at all times.
You may find that certain legacy software and systems will only work on specific, physical hardware. If these can’t be migrated, updated or retired, then physical hardware on-premise or in a data centre will need to remain a part of your IT mix – at least until those systems reach end of life and it’s time for change.
Think also about the predictability of your compute workloads. If you anticipate rapid growth or seasonal change, the flexibility and on-demand availability of Cloud-based computing would be a great way of ensuring that technology helps your business achieve its full potential.
What’s more, Cloud offers fantastic advantages in terms of resilience and disaster recovery, without the CapEx/OpEx expense of replicating your own hardware across two office sites or data centre locations.
So, what you are hopefully starting to see here is that it isn’t necessarily a case of; which is best, Cloud or On-prem? But more a case of; what’s right for your business, not just now, but in the future too.
And it’s important to remember that the two are not mutually exclusive. Although a journey towards Cloud-native is often a good end goal, a hybrid solution is often the best route to full Cloud Maturity.
With this in mind, a good place to start is with an audit of the way that your organisation uses IT. This might include considerations as diverse as the operating systems and software that are central to your day-to-day operations, through to compute demand profiles and your IT staff workloads. A thorough interrogation of how IT enables your business to operate at optimum performance (now and in the future) will offer a fruitful insight into which model will work best for you.
But remember those stats… Cloud Computing continues to maintain a rapid growth trajectory and organisations that embrace Cloud tend to be more agile, faster to market and better protected from a resilience and redundancy perspective. If you don’t want to risk falling behind the curve, get ahead now with a clear plan of your route to cloud that futureproofs your business and keeps you ahead of the game.