The power of the clouds – why settle for one?

The inception of the modern-day cloud was launched almost 2 decades ago.

3 years ago, I spoke with a well renowned contact and asked him what the top barriers to cloud adoption were. Security was the common denominator – data security and general security risks.

Fast forward to today. The COVID-19 pandemic with its remote workforce still has devastating ramifications for businesses across different vertical sectors, the Ukraine/Russia crisis has amplified cyber and nation state attacks, businesses of all sizes have opened their eyes as they remain on high-risk alert and are looking for more scalable, flexible, cost-effective solutions. The shift to the cloud has been one of the measures that have seen a rapid increase.

Gartner predicts that by 2025, 51% of IT spending (within the application software, infrastructure software, business process services and system infrastructure markets) will have shifted from traditional solutions to the public cloud compared to 41% in 2022.

The numbers are staggering and the opportunities for providers such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud are on an upwards trend as cloud technology gets assimilated into business infrastructure and becomes their modus operandi.

So why are so many organisations still struggling to overcome some of the barriers? What are they and how can some of these myths be debunked?

I have already invested in my own data centres and my security is sufficient.

Whether your infrastructure is on premise or on the cloud or a mixture of the two, many organisations fail to detect and identify the source of the increasing number of cyberattacks. Having sufficient security controls is paramount to ensure scalability and business continuity.

Cloud service providers have invested billions in ensuring they have the right cybersecurity methodologies and tools to enhance security for their customers and continue to do so. Although, on premise applications may be secure, reliable and allow businesses to maintain a certain level of control, the sheer effort and cost of managing and maintaining hardware, software licenses, integration capabilities, incident response management not to mention keeping hold of skilled staff and training increases the organisation’s risk exposure and could be a barrier itself on the scalability front.

Moving to the cloud will automatically save me money.

Not always the case. It’s a fairly simple concept as you only pay for what you use on the cloud. No sunken costs on hardware or replenishment, power usage, space, etc.

For example, In the case of a server, once you’ve reached the storage space limit, you are faced with purchasing a new server to increase bandwidth. Businesses with a seasonal trend on customer flows with an on-premise solution may not find it as cost-effective when traffic flows resume to normal levels and their server sits there with a high under utilisation rate.

According to the IDC, the most prominent industries who will be spending the most on cloud computing are those which deal with the most data yield – i.e., retrieving vast amounts of sensitive information from several different locations are Manufacturing ($20 billion), Professional Services ($18 billion) and Banking ($16 billion).

But caveat emptor – the cloud offers a long list of services, tools and options all of which can escalate costs for a business quickly if it is unprepared on its requirements. Most of them offer tools to help manage billing and costs but the onus is on the organisation to get the cloud optimised to meet their specific requirements in the first place.

If it ain’t broke, then don’t fix it right?

Wrong – unless there are strict regulatory, legal constraints on managing data. On premise, tried and tested legacy systems, applications, hardware, etc are not as agile as a cloud solution. If your business is looking to grow, scale up then the need to ensure your IT infrastructure can scale too is key. Add to this attractive cost savings and increased security levels wrapped into the service and it’s only a matter of time before a digital transformation starts to show results.

Having my data on premise is safer than having it on the cloud.

Hmm. With only 1 in 10 organisations’ apparently being able to analyse over 75% of their security events both on premise and in the cloud, the concerns around cloud security, data loss and data privacy still remain a big challenge for businesses of all sizes.

SMEs are not just looking to survive in these challenging times but save as much money as possible without compromising the security of their customer data. Often lacking in the relevant security expertise and knowledge, 40% of them have found it more cost-effective to employ third-party cloud platforms than maintaining an in-house system.

Of all the cloud services, studies show that management tools and security services are expected to be the fastest-growing segments with a 28.4% improvement.

With the traditional on premise set up, the onus is on the business to mitigate against cyberthreats. Staying on top of patches, security certificates, etc can often be missed. Cloud providers with their deep pockets are seen to be on top of their game with security policies, compliance adherence, etc. In most cases, more so than what the traditional organisation has in place. Automation plays a key role here – intelligent collaboration and integration with change control processes across different devices, firewalls with robust threat intelligence, vulnerability management and incident response capability all boost the security ecosystem.

Interestingly, most public cloud breaches have been driven by an enterprise customer’s insecure configurations. Gartner predicts that through 2025, 99% of cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault NOT the security providers.

No business is guaranteed against cyberattacks – whether on cloud or on premise they are facing the same threats and risk exposure. The difference here is to do with responsibility and accountability.

Migrating to a cloud environment is going to be painful and disruptive.

Not always the case as it depends on the current state of a company’s infrastructure. The business in the main has complete control over its software, policies and data. The flexibility to scale up or down on cloud usage is cost effective and provides economies of scale.

Treat the cloud migration as any other digital transformation project – with careful planning, a clear cloud strategy and implementation plan. Deployment compared to an on-premise solution is often quicker and less disruptive to the business. The key is in the planning. Plan. Plan. And plan again.

All my data is on one cloud so I’m tied in and can’t use another one, right?

No. You can adapt your public clouds such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), G- Cloud and/or private cloud environments to suit your business operating model – growth, scalability, cost management, giving you a greater level of flexibility, control and agility over how you manage, secure your data and where you store it.

The choice as to whether you should operate within a hybrid or multi-hybrid cloud is a no brainer. Some of the benefits can be seen below:

• Take advantage of competitive pricing to suit your needs.
• Optimise cost savings and operational efficiency – no physical hardware investment (save on Capex) s, no trained staff to manage hardware, better space utilisation, pay per use, etc.
• More robust resilience and security – access to latest applications, innovation, analytics, etc to better manage your business needs across different geos.
• Benefit from advanced network performance improvements.
• To migrate from one cloud to another is not onerous – an automated migration configuration solution will do the heavy lifting for you with minimal disruption to your business.
• Support your business digital transformation projects with seamless orchestration across public and private clouds so you can take advantage of existing data centres, etc.
• Increase your competitive and strategic advantage – to support different countries judicial restrictions on data management

Cloud adoption is here to stay – but the companies which are forward thinking have moved beyond the adoption of a cloud to a hybrid multi-cloud strategy giving them more freedom and control to transfer their applications between multiple clouds based on best performance and/or cost effectiveness.

Paul Maritz summarises this well – “Cloud is about how you do computing, not where you do computing”.