Modernizing IT infrastructure is a critical priority for businesses aiming to stay competitive, agile, and secure. IT Departments are often faced with the decision to stay on premise, or migrate to the cloud. Even when a Cloud migration decision is made, further decisions exist on what is cost effective to be in the cloud and what is better to leave on premise.
In today’s IT Landscape, there are broadly 3 ways to consume IT Cloud Services:
IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) – IaaS for short, is when a cloud computing vendor (such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft etc.) hosts the infrastructure on behalf of their customers.
Infrastructure refers to the computers and servers that run code and store data. Services provided by the cloud computing vendor can include operating systems, network infrastructure, security and other services. Customers can then access this cloud infrastructure over the Internet. As a customer, you rent the IT Cloud Infrastructure resources on demand, and pay only for the resources your organization consumes.
PaaS (Platform as Service) – Is a type of cloud computing service model that offers a flexible, scalable cloud platform to develop, deploy, run, and manage apps. PaaS is very useful for organisations or individuals involved in Software or other types of IT Developments. PaaS provides everything developers need for application development without the headaches of updating the operating system and development tools or maintaining hardware. Instead, the entire PaaS environment—or platform—is delivered by a third-party service provider via the cloud.
SaaS (Software as a Service) – Provides you with software applications that is run and managed by a vendor. In most cases, people consuming Software as a Service are using third-party end-user applications. With a SaaS offering you do not have to think about how the service is maintained or how the underlying infrastructure is managed, you only need to think about how you will use that particular piece of software. A common example of a SaaS application is yahoo or google mail.
IaaS is however an interesting concept that started off with a lot of sceptism from Businesses, but has gained so much popularity in the last few years. Businesses, Governments and Organisations that have Data Centers or require servers, no matter what the size, should continuously evaluate the justifications and business case for moving to the cloud.
Below are some practical reasons why cloud migration is fast gaining popularity:
Reduced Cost and Administrative Effort
Reduced OPEX – As Server Admin effort will become lower, leaner and more focused staffing levels are required within the IT function, saving ongoing OPEX costs, while allowing your organisation to focus on the core business.
Recruitment Effort and Financial Savings from Costly Attrition – By migrating to the cloud, you have less pressure to “warehouse” scarce and costly IT resources, making you worry less about attrition, a key decimal with skilled IT resources especially in Nigeria and some other African countries.
Improved Efficiency in Capital Utilisation – By calculating your exact IT infrastructure requirements, and paying on demand for only what you use, the cost of excess and unutilized IT infrastructure capacity is avoided. Capital tie down that comes with proactively building excess capacity with on premise Data Centers becomes unnecessary.
Capital Expenditure Saving – The capital expenditure of building expensive Data Centers is completely eliminated with the cloud. The need to further duplicate this cost, with a Disaster Recovery Data Centre is eliminated. The burden of replacing Servers every 5 years is also completely eliminated saving organisations further costs.
Administrative Overhead – System Backups, Application of patches, Operating System upgrades and Security updates are automatically done by the Cloud Service Provider taking further administrative effort off “In House” IT Teams.
Improved Security Focus
Bullet Proof Security – Maintaining high cyber security service levels can be difficult for internal IT Teams to keep pace with. Cloud computing vendors on the other hand, focus on this as their core business. Updates and monitoring are done regularly and timely.
SLAs – Invariably, when you migrate to the cloud, the security of your IT infrastructure / services is automatically outsourced. With the right Service Level Agreements in place, even the most security conscious organisations can go to rest!
Significantly reduced risk of attack – The complexities and risk of mistakes where each individual organization designs their own IT Security Architecture is eliminated as you will leverage on already existing and proven security architecture from the service provider. The chances of attacks such as ransomware is therefore invariably reduced.
Improved Ability to Scale IT
Infrastructure Services Up or Down
Flexibility – No matter the size of your business, when you migrate to the cloud, you can start off with whatever IT Infrastructure you need and grow at your own pace depending on how your business scales.
Time to value – Ordering physical Server Hardware typically takes a minimum of about 6 weeks, from ordering to delivery. Cloud Hardware can be set up and ready for use in a matter of hours, making your organisation nimbler with IT deployments!
Improved Reliability
Migrating to the Cloud provides more resilience in the event of unanticipated disaster. Cloud Service Providers usually have Disaster Recovery Centers in multiple regions around the world, giving more reliability to the Disaster Recovery (DR) process.
Downtime and Switching time from one Infrastructure to the your Backup Infrastructure is very low in the event of an actual Disaster Recovery making your down time much shorter.
Prior to making the final cloud migration decision, it is prudent to seek expert opinion with a view to accurately answering some questions such as:
What is the actual computing resources you currently use across your Server Estate (e.g. RAM, Speed, Space)?
What time frame during the day and what period is the most RAM and Speed required?
Which applications require more computing resources and exactly what do they require?
What amount of buffer resources do you require, why and exactly what resources are required?
Do you have good and stable internet with at least 5mbps bandwidth?
Olubunmi Abegunde is the CEO of Thamani Multi Concepts, a consulting firm that specializes in ERP implementation, SAP software, and IT project management solutions.
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