By Bluegrass Digital CEO Nick Durrant

Modern businesses are moving customer-facing websites and apps to the cloud. It enables them to reduce infrastructure costs and spend more time focusing on revenue opportunities and business growth. Cloud requires a major shift in thinking in order to improve the user experiences and increase repeat business.

Many companies already use multiple cloud providers in addition to their on-premise deployments and private cloud. This creates unique challenges when trying to make advanced services simpler to consume and maintain. It's even a bigger challenge for business leaders to address the need for quicker and consistent app deployment across multiple platforms, each of which may have different configurations and capabilities.

Gartner claims that multi-cloud strategies will reduce vendor dependency for two-thirds of organisations through 2024, but this will happen in ways other than application portability. It says few applications ever move once they have been deployed in production and adopted by the business. The majority of multi-cloud strategies are more focused on procurement, functionality and risk mitigation than on portability.

So why should one consider moving to the cloud? The short answer is that it provides lower infrastructure cost with massive financial and operational rewards. There are many other benefits to move to a cloud architecture, these could include greater flexibility, lower operational overheads and reduced infrastructure costs.

It is a challenging and highly complex task that requires careful planning. Business is fast realising that migrating to the cloud is not as easy as it seems and there is a huge amount of learning and upskilling required. This is a reason why businesses need to find a partner to support them on this journey.

With cloud-based apps, businesses now have access to a plethora of benefits that traditional apps could never provide.

Eliminating costs

For any company, establishing and running a physical data centre could be a costly and time consuming affair. It requires a range of physical resources that are knowledgeable and experienced. By opting for cloud data servers, businesses merely pay for the service and can unsubscribe at any point. Cloud helps cut on the overall investment expenses and adds to better return on investment.

Scalability

Instead of purchasing and keeping several servers, storage and licenses, cloud allows one to purchase additional storage and licenses instantly at any time.

Flexible resources

Employees can now work remotely using desktop virtualisation, a cloud-based app that enables staff to access their desktops from anywhere. They can access their apps, services and data regardless of where they are, as long as they have a device that connects to the internet.

Remote access to data

Need to make key business decisions when traveling, cloud is the answer. It provides instant access 24/7 to all important data and one no longer needs to keep redundant copies of this data on any device whilst traveling. More importantly, the data is always updated so one will always be accessing the same data that any team member is working on.

Better collaboration

Employees can now work and collaborate from anywhere. Cloud-based services and apps enable staff to access the same tools and data, no matter what device they are working from. In so doing, it keeps everyone on the same page, reducing the risk of miscommunication and increases efficiencies.

Always up-to-date software

With most cloud-based solutions, businesses no longer need to worry about updating or maintaining software. With Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), the tools and apps are updated automatically without any intervention from the IT department.

Improved security

Updated software also means improved security, using cloud-based apps can help ensure staff are using the most secure software possible. This can also help prevent unauthorised access to confidential or sensitive company information that is stored in the cloud.

Competitive advantage

Forward-looking companies will continue to find new ways to transform, they are putting their apps in the cloud because the business case is compelling and it gives them a competitive advantage. As they gain experience with migrating to the cloud, new opportunities for increasing agility, focus and cost savings will emerge.