Cloud services represent a significant paradigm shift in the technology infrastructure of companies. Not just for the obvious fact that it saves time, work, and money, but for the economic and technical benefits that can bring to any company.
Cloud computing is an unstoppable trend. In the European Union alone, 36% of companies were using the cloud in 2020. Since 2018, the use of cloud computing in the region has grown from 24%, particularly in the manufacturing sector, marking a positive and increasingly rapid evolution. According to Gartner, four trends are driving this cloud expansion: cloud ubiquity, regional cloud ecosystems, sustainability, and the carbon-smart cloud - which allows the enterprise to move workloads on-premises to match its energy use with available green power - as well as automated programmable infrastructure from cloud infrastructure and platform service providers (CIPS).
Most companies used to have their data processing centers (servers, storage, and network) in their own facilities until very recently: we are talking about on-premises models. These facilities had a high cost of ownership (TCO).
However, this type of solution implies an over-dimensioning of resources in order to have the capacity for growth and, therefore, underuse of the systems, as well as CAPEX investments. Companies had to assign part of their budget to maintenance, including the cost of land, electricity, and technical support for tasks that did not have a direct (or positive) impact on their business. On the contrary, in cloud computing, the infrastructure (or part of it) is in remote services, which can be accessed through the Internet or virtual private networks among other huge benefits such as:
In terms of security, cloud computing offers a significant improvement compared to the rest of the data protection services. The cloud computing security model is not on a single technology or solution but is built with multiple layers. This includes infrastructure software, encryption of Internet communications, protection of stored data against unauthorized access and service interruptions, a Zero Trust approach, security of the entire hardware infrastructure, defense of data centers and access to your premises, and constant service availability.
However, migration to the cloud might not be easy or suitable for all companies since it just doesn’t work as easily as the click of a button. Depending on the size and the type of the project this can take months and involve a large part of the organization.
Organizations should take the time to understand what their current infrastructure and applications are, what gaps they have, what their needs are, and what goals can be achieved by moving some or all of their infrastructure to a cloud environment before migrating to the cloud. In other words, the aim is not to get to the cloud for no reason, but to determine what is going to be done and what we want to achieve once we are there. To achieve that, companies should: carefully analyze the needs they have, identify the most suitable cloud service, plan the migration in advance, and keep a maintenance analysis to check and manage these resources in the cloud, monitoring their costs and properly measuring the benefits that are being obtained.
With this guide you will learn:
* White Paper elaborated in collaboration with Google Cloud.