Cloud adoption has become one of the biggest trends in IT in recent years—and it’s likely here to stay. According to LogicMonitor, organizations will run a staggering 83 percent of all workloads in the cloud by 2020, up from 68 percent in 2017. It’s easy to see why so many organizations are making this shift. Cloud-based workloads run from within the same infrastructure, making them more efficient and less costly to run.
Here’s a look at some of the workloads you should consider moving to the cloud and why:
As vital as e-mail is to your cross-organizational communications, it can be expensive and time consuming to maintain. Not only do you need to purchase servers specifically for this purpose, but you also need to employ IT workers to manage your on-premises e-mail infrastructure.
Moving your e-mail workloads to the cloud will remove the burden of maintenance from your shoulders while making it more convenient for your team to access their e-mail. Through the cloud, your employees will be able to check their messages and keep in contact with one another no matter where they are in the world.
Disaster recovery
The cloud has revolutionized disaster recovery (DR) planning in a way that was unimaginable mere years ago. Traditional on-premises DR is difficult to facilitate because in-house data centers are susceptible to threats like power outages and natural disasters. Should one of these situations bring down your data center, then you could lose precious company files.
The cloud improves DR workloads by migrating your information to an off-site data center that is far less susceptible to typical threats to business continuity. Should an outage occur at one site, your cloud vendor will run your workloads from another. Most of the time, you won’t even know that there has been an outage. Replicating servers and storing backups in a cloud environment is also much easier and far less costly than it is to do on premises.
Development
Many IT teams struggle to finish their software projects within set deadlines, but traditional testing and development environments can cause even more setbacks for them. On-premises test/dev workloads require enormous capacity to facilitate these projects efficiently, but very few have the resources to be able to do so.
The cloud, on the other hand, streamlines test/dev processes by giving your IT team access to all the tools and resources they need to develop new company software without bottlenecks. They can also get environments running in just a few minutes, which further expedites time to launch.
Customer relationship management (CRM)
CRM is essential to fostering strong relationships with your clientele, but it can be a difficult function to maintain in house. Outsourcing the management of this workload to a cloud provider will save you valuable time and resources—and it’s remarkably easy to do. Since it requires no hardware, you won’t need to set up your own servers when deploying CRM in the cloud; your provider will handle all of these responsibilities for you.
With your CRM workloads in the cloud, your team members will be able to access client information whether they are at their desk or on the go. This makes preparing for and taking sales calls less of a hassle, especially when calls come in at the last minute. Cloud-based CRM is also scalable, so it can evolve to meet your organization’s needs over time. So, as your list of customers grows, you will have the workload to support it.
Desktops
As more organizations go mobile, the need to move desktops to the cloud has grown. Delivered through a desktop as a service (DaaS) model, this will allow you to run your organization’s operating system using virtual machines (VMs) stored in your cloud vendor’s servers. Like other cloud services, DaaS is available via subscription. Though your monthly cloud bill will depend on your VM consumption, moving this workload to the cloud will still eliminate the costs of hosting it on premises.
With DaaS, your provider will shoulder most of the burden of hosting. As such, you’ll enjoy all of the best parts of desktop virtualization without the inconveniences of hosting it. You will merely be responsible for managing the desktop applications you use and, to a certain extent, the security of your desktop.
Collaborative tools
It’s becoming more common than ever for organizations to employ teams that work outside of traditional office environments. Whether your employees are spread across multiple offices or work remotely, you need a way to foster collaboration among your entire workforce. Migrating your collaborative tools to the cloud will allow you to create a single platform for all employee communications. No matter what device they are using to access your files, your staff can easily access and share documents with one another.
By moving your collaborative tools into a cloud environment, you’ll also be able to take advantage of the modern capabilities of the cloud. This will replace outdated on-premises solutions with services that leverage modern tools to ensure that your entire team stays on the same page.