Cloud Migration & Apps Modernization: What are the benefits?
Digital transformation involves cloud technologies and the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the cloud adoption trends across industries. Considering the cloud computing landscape, there are quite a number of reasons that make businesses migrate into the cloud such as modernizing outdated legacy apps as well as taking advantage of modern solutions like Big Data & Advanced Analytics to extract insights from the large volume of businesses data collected, etc.
Cloud migration allows employees to access business apps and data anywhere and anytime, improving business agility and operations. This also translates to better innovation which helps businesses to achieve a competitive advantage in the increasingly difficult digital economy.
Why should businesses consider cloud migration?
Generally speaking, outdated legacy systems are usually poor in terms of performance with very high maintenance costs. Also, legacy apps are incompatible with new technologies which hinder business growth as they cannot keep up to date with the changing demand by customers - which can only be met with advanced cutting-edge technologies.
Furthermore, support for legacy apps will usually discontinue after a certain period, meaning the matter of data security becomes riskier and more vulnerable - making migrating to the cloud crucial.
What are the benefits that drive cloud migration & apps modernization?
- Improve digital transformation
Business leaders can achieve digitization of their business processes via the adoption of modern systems like ERP and advanced analytics, etc. Digital transformation can help improve employees’ productivity and bring new streams of revenues among many other benefits.
- Accelerate growth
It is an undeniable fact that technology is helping to accelerate growth in businesses. Organizations that migrate to the cloud can introduce new software systems into their businesses that are interoperable and enable one single source of truth, at the same time allowing quick scalability and efficient data management.
- Risks Mitigation
Among the significant benefits of the cloud is that it can help businesses dramatically mitigate risk. For example, with cloud services, organizations can test run to determine whether their collected data can produce any actionable insights, especially when organizations are not certain if their data contains any valuable hidden information. Organizations can spin up a cluster to run some tests and then turn it back down without incurring much overall project risk.
In the best-case scenario, if organizations can find the needed insights, they can quickly ramp up more cloud resources to scale the project without spending much additional money purchasing and implementing systems and software.
- Improve business agility
Unlike traditional on-premise servers, cloud technology resources can be scaled up or down on-demand, providing greater flexibility for businesses in terms of IT hardware resources and budget allocation. Organizations do not have to spend a lot of time placing orders and waiting for the physical hardware component to arrive for installation. This helps to speed up time to market and improve business agility.
- Costs-efficiency
For many cloud solutions, cloud deployments allow customers to only pay for the services that they use, businesses do not have to make a considerable up-front investment like on-premise. Additionally, with the pay-as-you-go model, businesses can determine the cloud resources required and scale up or down based on actual needs, paying only for the amount of the resource consumed, eliminating unnecessary hardware.
- Simplify Operation
When moving to the cloud, businesses no longer have to allocate significant IT human resources to manage their own on-premises data centers, because the responsibilities are now in the hands of cloud services providers. Business organizations can utilize their resources for more value-added activities, as well as consolidate their operations, thereby improving efficiency.
- Leverage modern technologies
Migrating to the cloud enables businesses to leverage and adopt new, leading-edge technologies like AI and Big Data & Advanced Analytics, which are NOT easily developed and deployed on-premise (for instance, the elasticity nature of cloud computing enables faster time to insight in contrast to physical on-premise infrastructure).
Common challenges associated with cloud migration
Still, cloud migration is a long and complex process that cannot be done overnight. Below are some of the common challenges that may deter the progress of cloud migration:
- Poor strategy and planning
Proper planning with a clear roadmap is critical for businesses looking to migrate to the cloud. To achieve a successful project implementation, organizations must plan ahead to avoid or overcome any potential roadblocks. There’s no one size fit all approach, thus, if an organization is looking to modernize legacy applications, the best approach would depend on the problem they’re trying to solve.
- Vendor lock-in
A cloud provider may provide a wide range of services offerings, but sometimes these services may not be interoperable with other platforms that are necessary to such an organization. Due to the nature of vendor lock-in, many business organizations would find it hard to change to another cloud provider, which is another common problem of cloud adoption.
- Data security and compliance
For the majority of businesses in this day and age, especially in the banking and financial sector, data security and compliance are among the most critical concerns when migrating to the cloud. A business organization operating its own on-premises servers would have complete control over security - in contrast to the cloud in which cloud providers will assume the responsibility of securing the infrastructure while the task of protecting the data itself needs to be performed by both vendors and clients.
- Project Evaluation
Any implementation project would require an optimal rate of return on investment and cloud migration is no exception. Thus, it’s important to consider the evaluation of the project’s success based on ROI.
Conclusion
Business is shifting to cloud computing technology in order to take advantage of technology advancement as well as to quickly respond to the increasing competitive pressures. As a leading software company in Vietnam & APAC region, we understand the cloud benefits and challenges entails and can help provide a smooth transition without disrupting your day-to-day operations.
Contact our solutions experts today and see how we can help transform and take your business to the next level.
