mLogica thought Leaders: 5 Signs Your Business Is Ready for Cloud Migration

Cloud migration has dramatically spiked in recent years, reflecting equally dramatic fluctuation in the global business landscape. Many organizations are migrating to the cloud as the fastest, most cost-effective path to accelerate service delivery and future-proof their business. This is borne out by a 2023 survey from Gartner that shows worldwide end user spending on public cloud will reach approximately $600 billion in 2023, up over twenty percent from $491 billion in 2022. Gartner also forecasts that 75% of businesses will embrace a digital transformation model on a cloud platform.

A 2022 McKinsey survey offers similar insights into how ambitious businesses worldwide have become to leverage cloud capabilities and savings, declaring that by 2025 large enterprises want 60% of their environments in the cloud. A separate survey by McKinsey shows the majority of enterprises aim to spend eighty percent of their IT hosting budgets on the cloud, including infrastructure as a service (IaaS), software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and private cloud. The survey further shows cloud adoption can help companies worldwide unlock $1 trillion in business value, a sure sign it will only accelerate in the near future.

However, cloud migration is a key strategic business move, one that requires a thorough analysis of your current and future business needs. You’ll need a solid cloud migration strategy to make it a success. For over twenty years mLogica has empowered customers to successfully migrate to the cloud, delivering end-to-end legacy and mainframe modernizations of mission critical environments in more than 600 enterprise-scale engagements.

Here are five indicators your business is ready to migrate to the cloud:

Increased growth means you need to respond fast to new challenges that come with expansion, including increased technical demands, the need for greater bandwidth to support more customers, as well as mitigating potential impacts to service delivery. Traditional data centers with legacy technology are often limited in their ability to accommodate such surges in workload demands.

But cloud technologies are built to support growth rather than block it. By moving to the cloud, you gain access to more robust and resilient IT services to support business expansion. Additionally, with a cloud platform comes a wide variety of cloud-native capabilities, including dynamic scalability, which enable the timely provision of new compute resources. This is a big boon for companies operating on limited budgets that can’t afford the large upfront costs to purchase new hardware.

The bottom line—if you’re experiencing a sudden surge in workload demands due to a growing number of clients, but can’t afford the significant expense of new servers and supporting hardware, it’s time to move to the cloud.

Every piece of hardware comes with an expiration date. All these onetime assets, including servers, routers and other supporting hardware, will age out, leaving you with hefty ongoing maintenance costs, and fewer and fewer resources with the knowledge to keep them in service. Running a complex legacy in-house data center requires heavy financial and resource investment, particularly for large enterprises with correspondingly large IT infrastructures.

By moving to the cloud, you save the hefty upfront costs of purchasing, maintaining and upgrading hardware, since the platform provides scalable compute resources, leaving you to pay only for bandwidth you utilize. If your hardware assets are at or nearing end-of-life and you want to avoid the huge expense of supporting legacy systems, this is the time to migrate your mainframe and distributed workloads to the cloud. At mLogica, our expert modernization teams have successfully performed hundreds of such migrations.

Data security is a top concern for any business. If sensitive information such as IP data, customer details, financial records and employee files is compromised it opens the company to regulatory penalties and widespread reputational damage, with resulting impact to the bottom line. The bigger and more widely-dispersed your organization, the larger and more vulnerable your attack surface.

At mLogica, every month we see more organizations opting for advanced data security solutions that can protect their sensitive business information. A 2022 McKinsey survey sheds sobering light on this growing threat, reporting that the financial impact to businesses from cyberattacks is projected to reach $10.5 trillion annually by 2025—a 300% jump from 2015 levels.

For any organization, the safety of business data is a heavy responsibility that requires a significant ongoing investment of resources, including people, ever-optimizing processes and security products. What’s more, to meet these threats your IT staff needs to be constantly focused on training, developing and deploying new solutions, plus buying and upgrading hardware and software to repel cyberattacks. This leaves little time for addressing the daily technical needs of your business, much less for innovation.

A more secure, affordable option is leveraging the up-to-the-second security technology of major cloud providers. Platforms like AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud spend billions on leading edge, proactive data security solutions that ensure their customers’ sensitive information is protected from current and emerging cyberattacks.

Disasters happen with little or no warning, and when they strike the consequences can severely impact or even destroy your entire IT infrastructure. A major disaster can damage business-critical data centers, including hardware and software assets, that represent huge investments of money and time made by your company. What’s more, without mechanisms in place to ensure business and service continuity, your revenue could suffer long-term impacts.

According to Gartner, downtime costs organizations an average cost of $5,600/minute—a whopping $336,000 an hour! For small and mid-sized businesses, this can be a devastating financial blow. Even for large multinationals, such a preventable hit to the bottom line, multiplied across the enterprise, can cause serious blowback for leadership.

But business that move to the cloud get the benefit of built-in, proven failover protocols, high availability and disaster recovery from day one. Cloud providers’ fault-tolerant servers, located in multiple regions, shield customers from system failures. Production servers switch over automatically to backup servers during disruptive events, ensuring foolproof, continuous business operation.

In addition, leading cloud hyperscalers, including AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud provide hundreds of availability zones in over two hundred countries. This means no matter how widespread the disaster, there are always more than enough unaffected availability zones to secure your data and business continuity.

Disasters and disruptive events can seriously affect any company’s business activity. If the event is compounded by failure to deploy immediate response and recovery procedures, and the situation persists or becomes public, it can destroy the organization’s reputation.

If your organization lacks a fault-tolerant high availability and disaster recovery (HADR) mechanism, you run the very real risk of losing your business data and eventually your customers. That’s why leveraging the leading edge HADR protections available on the cloud makes a lot of sense.

Running an on-premise data center comes with plenty of financial headaches. Expensive hardware and software, maintenance and upgrade costs, plus operational overheads add to ever-increasing IT expenses. Instead of your technology budget going to research, development and innovation that grow your business, you’re stuck paying millions every year simply to hold the line on legacy infrastructure.

Moving to the cloud means you no longer have to bear the upfront costs of hardware and software deployment, nor pay hefty bills for maintenance, licensing and upgrades. The cloud lets you auto-scale compute resources to provision and de-provision on demand, so your computing costs predictably follow the ebb and flow of your business, substantially reducing waste and unneeded redundancy.

Thus, cloud-native applications make it simple for businesses to track overall IT spend and avoid cost overruns. Migrating to the cloud with mLogica’s automated migration technologies helps organizations exit their costly data centers faster and more efficiently.

Cloud computing has redefined the business landscape and changed the way companies operate worldwide. However, an effective transition to the cloud must include a comprehensive analysis of your organization’s strategic goals now and into the future, along with advanced, automated migration technologies. When implemented by experts like mLogica’s legacy and mainframe modernization teams, cloud migration can be a game-changer for your business, helping you level up to the competition, accelerate service delivery and leverage cutting edge tools to grow your business.