Introduction

Cloud technology has become an integral part of almost every industry and organization over the past few years. Before cloud computing, people used to run their applications on on-premise servers and data centers. However, traditional on-premise data centers have several disadvantages.

  • Building and maintaining data centers are costly. You need to buy the servers, set up uninterrupted power and network, physical environment, security, redundancy, and also necessary personnel to run a data center 24/7. (High CapEx)
  • Underutilization of resources. Expecting future requirements and higher loads at times, enterprises set up data centers with high capacity, which are rarely consumed.
  • Lack of on-demand scalability. If an enterprise wants to scale up its operations with higher compute requirements, they have to replace the existing physical or virtual hardware with more costly and powerful hardware, incurring additional costs.
  • Lack of expert resources to maintain and manage data centers. 
  • DR center requirements with equivalent computing capabilities further add to costs and efforts.
  • Slower time to market as all the hardware/software needs to be acquired/developed and maintained.

Cloud-First Approach

With the introduction of public clouds, enterprises started to rent and use cloud computing infrastructure and services. Using cloud facilities/services required lesser initial costs (CAPEX) to set up and run applications with necessary compute storage and other resources. You don’t need to buy costly hardware and other software to develop, test, run, or research on newer ideas and applications. This kind of cloud computing also supported on-demand scaling and pay-as-you-use models. There is plenty of other software and services available from cloud providers, which help enterprises use these as a service and get their products/services to market as quickly as possible.

The Pandemic Impact on Cloud Adoption

Recent pandemic showed that enterprises with online cloud facilities and services could continue to make their employees work from home and serve their customers online. Many followed this model and migrated their applications to the cloud for continued service delivery and customer support. Educational institutions, Hospitals, Governments, Banks, Insurance companies, Retail, and many others have now proved this model successful by serving their customers using cloud and online platforms.

As per the stats, the cloud computing industry is expected to grow from $371 billion in 2020 to $832 billion in 2025. With the advent of alternative technology solutions, many businesses switch to cloud technology solutions to build their business models. Thus, cloud computing is an emerging trend in data center management that provides trendy, innovative, and relevant business models for all organizations. 

What is Cloud Adoption?

Cloud adoption involves allocating more or fewer cloud resources to a workload. Cloud adoption refers to a strategic move by organizations by moving their workloads to cloud environments to achieve cost reduction, risk mitigation, and scalability of their internet-based services. This means businesses engage with cloud computing practices or use remote servers and applications hosted on the internet to manage, store, and process critical data. Various industries like healthcare, retail, marketing and advertising, finance, and education benefit from cloud solutions.

Challenges in Cloud Adoption

While practicing, cloud adoption helps in identifying and providing a roadmap to resolve critical problems that businesses face during digital transformation, such as:

  • Developing financial models and advancing acquisitions.
  • Different stages of cloud technology adoptions and lack of staff capability.
  • Lack of partners eligible to support businesses on adoption by transacting PAAS, SAAS cloud products, leveraging migration and modernization scenarios. 
  • Lack of knowledge of cloud resource setup, provision, and governance.
  • Data security/Compliance concerns
  • Post-adoption support and maintenance

Why Do Businesses Need Cloud Adoption?

Here are a few of the important reasons why cloud computing is vital for business:

Scalability

When a business-friendly IT solution can be scalable easily and quickly, it can significantly impact operations immediately. Previously, scaling an environment on-demand supply was impossible, and companies were restricted to their hardware setup’s size and process power. 

With cloud adoption, the limitation has ceased, and it now truly revolutionizes how businesses manage technical resources.

Flexibility

Infrastructure is more flexible and obvious on the cloud, and it is an oft-cited reason why adoption is important for business. Meanwhile, flexibility also refers to cloud computing’s built-in future-proof model. Tech is an ever-evolving industry where automation is needed and needed for generating revenue for the business.

The expansion of a business traditionally involved huge amounts of financial and capital resources allocated to particular projects that generally could not generate revenue for the business. Today, companies have the technical ability to upgrade existing applications and scale the on-demand market changes. This on-demand flexibility of scaling capacity is possible by cloud adoption technology.

Innovation

Innovation is directly bound to new business heights. However, using effective technologies can restrain a company’s ability to experiment with new solutions and deploy those at a scalable level.

In the realm of web applications, fighting back-end performance issues will be a major struggle, while using the cloud as a framework improves performance, increases agility, and lowers costs.

Cost-efficiency

Generally, On-premises solutions are quite expensive, as they incur various costs. Among these expenses are hardware, implementation, and the costs of in-house personnel required to manage and update the system. On the other hand, cloud adoption allows organizations to eliminate the high costs associated with hardware and installation, as they can opt for a cost-effective subscription model.

Moreover, cloud solutions give enterprises the flexibility to choose what exactly they would like to pay for versus paying for services they do not need.

Improved DevOps

The main benefit of DevOps is its increased quality and procedure of innovative solution deployments. It is achieved by a flexible communication process that allows traditionally isolated terms to work together during the development cycle.

Its ability to add new functions while maintaining scalability is why many companies move to the DevOps model.

If a company is not utilizing cloud adoption with DevOps, they’re missing an opportunity for a quick product development process with the cloud’s exact business operations.

This improvement in the ability to release new functionalities faster and maintain scalability is why cloud adoption is important for your business.

Increased Security and Compliance

Many cloud service providers are enterprise-level organizations that adhere to strict privacy, data protection, and compliance standards.

Business leaders’ main concern is to migrate company or customer data and vital apps to the cloud. Meanwhile, major cloud service providers must dedicate vast resources to develop advanced security protocols and follow stringent compliance needs.

Lowered Complexity

One common problem business leaders face allocating resources to R&D of new solutions while managing and securing a company’s complex IT infrastructure.

Cloud service providers manage and secure IT infrastructure that enables companies to devote sources to operational scalability with multi-cloud management.

Continuous Industry Growth

The cloud adoption industry has blossomed into a massive industry within the past few years, especially in the AI and Data Science industry.

With AI and machine learning, cloud computing has become a more widespread species in the cloud computing landscape and will continue to grow rapidly. This growth in end-user functionalities and cloud computing capabilities directly impacts nearly all industries and verticals in the upcoming years.

Final Words!

The cloud is rapidly gaining traction among companies as they understand its benefits and how it impacts revenue, productivity, scalability, and security. Cloud-based solutions help companies avoid many of the problems associated with on-premises infrastructure. 

Your company can increase revenues by allowing an experienced partner to handle the testing, development, deployment, and management of your cloud solutions. This is because cloud adoption is accelerating faster than expected, and it looks as though the future will be cloudy. The best way to adopt the cloud for your business is to work with cloud partners or service providers.

About the Author

Why Cloud Adoption is Crucial for Businesses

Bibin Koshy

Cloud DevOps Engineer

Have more than 5 years of experience in Cloud/DevOps. Worked in CI/CD, cloud infrastructure setup, configuration management, containers, automation, supporting and delivering infrastructure to clients.