Advantages and Disadvantages of Migrating to Cloud Hosting

Corporate across the industries are now exploring various options to migrate business applications to the cloud to cut cost and to increase speed and scalability. Enterprises also now identify cloud migration as an efficient way to enhance customer engagement.

Migration is not such an easy process which required a proper strategy to ensure optimum functionality and security. Failing to migrate to cloud computing rightly may end up in higher operational cost or and potential loss of data. However, as the benefits outweigh the risks, it is high time for businesses to consider cloud hosting seriously. Being thoroughly knowledgeable about the technology and executing the migration in the most desired manner is the key to success.

Advantages and Disadvantage of cloud hosting

Advantages

1. Scalability

Cloud hosting offers you to encompass the support of multiple servers with which you can increase the capacity of storage to any extent at any point in time. It can not only help you to deal with any unexpected surge in traffic, but also to build an infrastructure which can exponentially grow as your requirement increases over a longer duration.

2. Better performance

Along with scalability, cloud computing also ensures higher performance. Increased capacity provides availability to the potential customers. Cloud computing offers better load balancing across multiple servers and decreases loading time from the nearest possible server. The result is a better user experience and more user acceptance.

3. Reduced cost

As there is no need for you to buy and set up your own hardware and also no need to maintain your on-premise administrators, cloud hosting can significantly reduce your operational cost. It is also advantageous that being an on-demand service, you need not have to pay extra for unused capacity.

Disadvantages

1. Security

Even though cloud services are secured, there may be some minor security threats associated with cloud hosting. To avoid this, for your critical business data, a private cloud hosting may be a better alternative to choose. However, the general risks are the same as of on-premise hosting itself.

2. Downtime

This risk is mostly associated with the hosting provider you choose. Most of the cloud hosting services out there may be only resellers with no proper customer support mechanism, in which downtime may be an issue. You need to choose direct professional service providers to tackle this problem.

3. Accessibility

Your data has internet dependency when hosting is done in the cloud. In typical cases, internet access is much easier and anytime, but in case of any severe technical trouble or disaster, causing an internet connectivity breakage, access to your data may be an issue.

Reviewing all the benefits and disadvantages of cloud services NJ, you can find out that the benefits in terms of cost, speed, and on-demand scalability far outweigh the risks, which is the primary reason why the cloud is a highly desirable hosting option nowadays. Notably, for start-up and small level businesses, the cloud is the best possible option for hosting and computing.

 A step-by-step approach to cloud migration

Step #1: Assess your current applications

It is essential to do the groundwork for assessing all your existing applications and identify the ones which are ideal for cloud migration. Along with this you can also try and segregate them to decide the supported models as private, public, or hybrid. The readiness of different application for cloud migration is determined based on various considerations as architecture, application lifecycle, data management needs, security, and other business concerns.

Step #2: Devising a migration strategy

A perfect migration strategy must be done by completing the business impact, cost analysis, and a thorough analysis of service aspects. A detailed evaluation of the present state and the essentiality of cloud migration also the prerequisites. You also need to quantify the value propositions as the cost-cutting benefits, reduction in capital expenditures, future operational expenses, deployment time and its implications, and scalability to name a few.

Step #3: Considering the technical feasibility

To have a clear understanding of technical feasibility, a thorough assessment of security, skills, scalability, integration, backup, monitoring, availability, and management is essential. Cloud services are available in the forms of:

1. IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service): You migrate an entire load of software, and the migration involves only minor technicalities. You may not migrate the applications which require hardware drivers or other devices in this model.

1. PaaS (Platform as a Service): This is ideal for supporting applications which run in multiple environments. This model is suitable for core applications in which the business logic gets executed with a unique set of components run on higher-end application servers along with access to a comprehensive database with app data and other stored procedures.

Among these, the enterprises must be able to identify the best possible course of action.

At the final step, once all the above decisions and procedures are ready, you can next work on the actual migration process with the assistance of an expert cloud service provider. As application migration is a much delicate project, you need to aid of skilled technicians as deployed by the cloud administration agency. You should also track every task performed, resources used, duration of the process, the risk involved, and cost for future reference.