The Cloud Explained: Five Benefits of Cloud Migration

With cloud adoption on the rise, more organisations than ever are realising the benefits of transitioning to the cloud. In this blog we’ll take you through five of the key benefits that come with cloud migration.

Cloud computing is seeing an inexorable rise, as organisations throughout the UK – and indeed the world – continue to transition more and more of their services online. Gartner recently forecast worldwide public cloud end-user spending to grow 18% to total $304.9 billion in 2021, as cloud migration trends accelerated as a result of hybrid working brought about by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

But why exactly are organisations migrating away from on-premises infrastructures to the cloud in their thousands? In this blog we’ll take you through five benefits of cloud migration.

Five Benefits of Cloud Migration

At Six Degrees we have enabled hundreds of organisations to realise their cloud ambitions, using our Microsoft-aligned Cloud Adoption Framework to springboard their workloads from legacy on-premises data centres to cutting-edge public, private and hybrid cloud environments. Here are five of the key cloud migration benefits we enable them to realise:

• Elasticity and scalability. With cloud, organisations only pay for the cloud resources that they use. This means that as organisations’ requirements evolve, they can instantly alter resource requirements on demand. As most cloud providers are on global platforms, organisations can enhance performance by running workloads closer to where users or customers are. This on-demand business model benefits future IT infrastructure and resource allocation, and also enables organisations to deploy applications quickly by adopting new technological capabilities, enabling organisations to take services to market faster, increasing revenue growth.
• Cost optimisation. Migrating to the cloud can be more cost-effective than the continued maintenance and management of a legacy on-premises infrastructure. Moreover, when evaluating an organisation’s current workloads, a Cloud Readiness Assessment can help to evaluate workloads that are redundant or which can be merged, ensuring more optimised costs in the future.
• Backup, recovery and failover. Cloud migration enables organisations to improve their disaster recovery and business continuity provisions by offering built-in, one-click backup and recovery capabilities. Rather than relying on secondary data centres connected through links that are often left redundant until called into use, cloud environments enable the deployment of sophisticated disaster recovery tools that can recover data and functionality in minutes – not hours or days.
• Remote collaboration and mobility. There’s no getting around it – hybrid working is here to stay. With hybrid working comes more complex user requirements and the need to provide ubiquitous experiences while ensuring performance, stability and security at all times. Cloud migration makes this significantly more straightforward, as the latest cloud-native applications can be deployed and managed using the most appropriate delivery methods.
• Enhanced cyber security and compliance. Cloud environments elevate organisations’ cyber security and compliance postures by meeting data protection, security and statutory requirements and storing valuable data and information in a central location. The major hyperscale cloud providers like Microsoft deliver robust cyber security throughout their public cloud platforms, and by partnering with a secure cloud provider like Six Degrees organisations can enhance this further through industry-leading consultancy and managed security services.

Your Secure Cloud Partner of Choice

The cloud is the direction of travel for a great many organisations, all of which are looking to reap the benefits of a successful cloud migration. However, these organisations often need support from an experienced third party in order to maximise their cloud investment.

At Six Degrees we believe we’re the best managed service provider in the UK. Our unrivalled expertise in private, hybrid and public cloud – validated by our Azure Expert MSP status – means you can be sure that your mission-critical systems are being looked after by the UK’s leading secure cloud provider.

So, what’s the first step? We recommend kickstarting your cloud transformation with a Cloud Readiness Assessment. Through the Cloud Readiness Assessment, we work with you to understand your cloud motivations and objectives. This enables us to design a scalable and flexible cloud solution that fits your evolving organisational requirements.