Although the migration to and the integration of a new IT platform may appear daunting at first, the cloud represents a real opportunity for you to revolutionise your IT processes. Whether you choose an on-demand platform such as eNlight or an established corporate solution such as Hyper-V, we believe that there are a number of benefits available to you when using the cloud; here we’ve detailed four of the ways in which the cloud can positively impact your organisation.
- Streamlined resources
Prior to the emergence of the cloud, companies were reliant on large and costly infrastructures that consisted primarily of many servers. The more physical servers you are using, the greater your costs; as well as the cost of hosting the server in the rack, running costs such as power and bandwidth need to be considered. The cloud helps you to streamline your demand for physical hardware: with virtualisation you are able to achieve the same, but with far fewer servers. Virtualisation allows you to consolidate your physical servers into virtual machines that are hosted on physical hardware; although hardware is still needed, a single virtualisation server will have resources making it capable of hosting multiple virtual machines. - No more waiting around
A cloud platform can provide resources on tap. There will be no more waiting around for hardware to be provisioned, rather if you require a new environment then this can be provisioned instantly on a cloud platform. No matter if you choose a public or private cloud deployment, large pools of resources will be available to tap into when you require them. - Your IT workforce will expand
Previously many had worried that the onslaught of cloud would lead to IT departments shrinking or disappearing altogether in some cases. IT departments will move away from providing a supporting role to the wider organisation and instead will focus on developing relationships with business areas and third-party providers so that they are put in a position that allows them to fully understand the requirements of individual departments and meeting these with infrastructure from third-party cloud companies. - Additional skills developed
For those in charge of cloud deployment in your organisation, there will be a distinct need to develop new skills to account for the new challenges and scenarios that cloud will introduce. Whereas IT management has been a task taken care of mainly by systems administrators, cloud platforms could require a larger team of experts including individuals specialising in virtualisation to aid with the consolidation of hardware, as well as security experts to secure the platform in the face of widespread security threats that are becoming much more common.