With each passing year, more and more businesses make the same realization:
Storing data on-site is a risk you can’t afford to take in today’s market.
It’s expensive, difficult to scale, and an unnecessary burden in the age of the cloud.
80% of businesses in the US plan to increase their use of cloud service.
That’s a staggeringly high number — and for a good reason.
This article will look at why that is and show you how to unlock the full potential of your organization through cloud transformation.
What is Cloud Transformation?
Cloud transformation is taking all the data sitting in the hard drives of your office and storing them on the cloud instead. This means you don’t need to eat the cost of backing up your data and keeping your servers powered on all the time.
And as a natural process of transferring your data to the cloud, you’re forced to optimize your company’s data management, analytics and security to suit the digital age better.
Why is Cloud Transformation the New Normal?
The massive reduction in costs is one of the main reasons why businesses switch to the cloud.
In this virtual machine cloud era, companies have realized that they can forego hardware purchases if they simply jump into the cloud.
Not only does it help businesses pivot to remote working models, but it also helps them re-imagine their business value in today’s application-based technology ecosystem.
Cloud Transformation Eliminates Data Silos
The sheer amount of digital data your organization deals with is enough to bog operations down eventually.
Finance, HR, marketing, administration, and other departments grow in complexity as the years pass.
This increase in size and complexity makes it difficult for your departments to communicate with each other. Reduced communication leads to easily preventable losses in profit and productivity.
Too many moving parts in an organization lead to higher risk as things grow more fragmented.
Cloud-based systems remove this complexity and let you package everything together instead. This allows everything to be connected holistically and meaningfully.
Cloud Transformation Promotes Innovation
Let’s face it. Most businesses have no idea how to scale horizontally. Their infrastructure is complex and convoluted and uses multiple databases and architectures. This dramatically increases the management necessary to operate everything. As a result, operations are no longer quick and nimble but take forever to adapt to the smallest changes.
Cloud transformation consolidates everything into a simpler, streamlined platform.
It makes deploying and developing applications significantly easier while dealing with large infrastructures simultaneously. Your developers have reduced toolchains, frameworks, and programming languages to deal with.
This allows your teams to focus on out-of-the-box thinking to innovate and improve your bottom line instead.
Cloud transformation simplifies the protection of your IT real estate
The arms race between hackers and developers grows in complexity, increasing costs incurred on your business.
Your IT task force is divided between maintaining regular operations and security.
The power of cloud engineering allows you to outsource all of your security-related concerns to professionals while allowing your IT personnel to focus on what’s essential to your business.
In-house security will never be as comprehensive as third parties, who will agree to contracts that mitigate your risk against intruders.
That’s an irresistible deal you just can’t get from in-house teams.
Cloud Engineering: From Paper to Practice
So how do you transform your business to take advantage of cloud engineering?
1. You transform your applications
The first step is to look at all your existing applications and make them compatible with the cloud environment.
Simple migrations are known as “lift and shift,” because they easily move from one place to another. But difficult migrations will require modifications of your application stacks so they can slip into your new cloud host.
This process is completely worth it, however, as refactoring everything from the front end, the middleware, processing and storage can yield benefits in speed and functionality.
2. You put your network on the cloud
This step is all about taking the moving components of your network to the cloud.
You do away with networks hidden behind firewalls and hub and spoke models because the cloud allows your employees to connect to your company network with software-defined networking technology.
This lets you deploy everything you need for your operations, such as virtual desktops and other infrastructure components.
3. You adopt cloud-compatible security practices
Different environments need different approaches to security. The policies that served your business well in the past decade won’t necessarily apply in tomorrow’s cloud-based environment.
Data leakage is a serious concern, with 93% of businesses concerned with data leakage in the cloud.
Thankfully, encryption at rest and during transit allows your shareholders peace of mind.
Not only does the cloud present application-based security, cloud workload protection platforms, cloud security posture management, and cloud access security brokers also play a vital role in protecting your data against intruders and malicious actors.
Combined with zero-trust networking strategies, your data is the safest it’s ever been.
Cloud Transformation — A Game Changer
Cloud transformation is one of the biggest industry disruptors of our time.
Once limited to technology giants, cloud engineering is making it possible for smaller businesses to operate on a massive scale.
Allowing businesses ubiquitous access to shared storage pools, networks, applications, and servers can allow even niche companies to compete with the big titans of their field.
As with any innovative disruption, cloud engineering will create winners and losers in the market — leaving those unable to make the transition worse.
The right approach and preparation can take your organization to the next level.
You’re not only modernizing your business but also reinventing it from the bottom up in many cases. It enables your business to become faster, more resilient, agile, future-proof, disaster-proof, and profitable in the long run.
