Since the inception of public clouds, a lot of CXOs have considered moving their IT infrastructure to the cloud and many have already done that. If your organization is considering migration to the cloud, learn what drove this mass movement from on-premises servers to the cloud. In this article, we'll explain the major reasons why organizations prefer the cloud, the issues you should watch out for, and how you should protect your cloud infrastructure.

Top five reasons for migrating to the cloud

One of the most recent organizations to move to the public clouds is StackExchange . The company had been moving parts of their platform to the cloud and finally decided to move everything in November 2024. With more well-established organizations with thousands of on-premises servers already in place still deciding to move to the cloud, let us explore the most important reasons why the movement to the cloud is happening.

Instant deployments: Scalable and agile

What happens when your business scales up and your servers are struggling to keep up?

1. You request for another server.
2. The SysAdmin or SRE gathers the list of requirements (OS, memory, disk capacity, and others).
3. The data center administrator then requests the vendor.
4. The vendor takes their sweet time to get back to you.
5. At times, the vendor says the server with the requested configuration is not available.
6. After back and forth communication that could span for months, you and the vendor settle on middle-ground.
7. The server arrives, and you configure it.
8. You procure the OS licenses (Windows, RHEL , or any other server OS).
9. Your server is then put to use.

Sounds painful, doesn't it? But what happens when you have a public cloud?

1. You request a cloud server.
2. Your SysAdmin gathers the requirements.
3. Five to six clicks on the cloud console is all it takes.
4. Your server is now ready for use.

There is one more threat looming in the global market: A shortage of GPUs. Server providers are finding it increasingly difficult to procure devices of higher capacity. This could force organizations to move to the public clouds, but it is better to make this decision before you are forced to do so.

Efficiency in cost and operations

Expensive and cost-efficient are different qualities. The major reason why organizations stayed away from public clouds is because the cloud was tagged as "expensive " by the tech community. If a business wants to scale down due to seasonal changes, most of the servers will become idle, occupying space and eating up power and bandwidth without much use. When it comes to the cloud and their "pay-as-you-go" models, you can suspend cloud instances when they are not of much use and you do not have to pay anything for them. The cloud is cost-efficient.

When it comes to scaling up, you can spawn cloud instances in an instant without additional cost for logistics or manual intervention. With features like the resource quota, you now get a predictive billing method with the cloud. Also, the cloud is more efficient to operate by eliminating the expenditure on hardware, infrastructure, logistics, and additional human-resources.

Security and compliance as part of the package

When you have on-premises servers, their physical and cybersecurity becomes your responsibility. The data you store must be adherent to the standards set by the regulatory bodies of the country you operate on like HIPAA and GDPR. If your organization operates in multiple countries, your IT infrastructure must be compliant with the local laws and regulations. These are all over-heads that most public clouds offer as part of the package. Public clouds have dedicated teams with advanced security measures in place. Security measures like data encryption, advanced firewalls, automated patches, MFA, compliance certifications, and sophisticated physical security are all already present in public clouds. With this approach, security and compliance become a shared responsibility between you and the cloud service provider.

Geographic redundancy

Public clouds have data centers in most parts of the world. This helps initiate a better disaster recovery plan. When one data center experiences an outage, you can immediately shift operations to another data center to minimize downtime and data loss. With an on-premises architecture, achieving this level of geographic redundancy is expensive and difficult to maintain.

More cloud resources to choose from

Cloud instances have evolved to perform more and more functions. To host a simple website, if you opt for on-premises server setup, you will need:

• Apache or NGINX to act as web server
• PostgreSQL or MySQL for a database
• Node.js, Django, or Ruby to handle the backend
• WordPress or Drupal for content management
• Redis for caching
• Load balancer
• TLS/SSL certificates
• Firewall

To host the same website in Google Cloud, you will only need:

• Compute Engine - Provides VMs
• Cloud Storage - Stores data
• Cloud SQL - Manages databases
• Cloud CDN - Delivers content quickly
• Cloud Load balancer - Distributes traffic
• Cloud DNS - Manages domain name
• Cloud Armor - Secures your website

Instead of handling multiple vendors and products, the cloud gives you all that is needed in one place.

Why is hybrid infrastructure picking up instead of cloud?

Seasoned CTOs, sysadmins, and SREs still believe that the safest hands are still their own. The cloud also comes with the vendor lock-in threat, that ties you to one cloud service provider (CSP) making it difficult to move out. While the applications that require high scalability are moved to the cloud, sensitive applications, legacy tools, and backups are still retained in their existing on-premises servers. This hybrid infrastructure is slowly gaining momentum among both cloud and on-premises organizations.

Does hybrid infrastructure require multiple monitoring tools?

Not, if you are protected by Site24x7. But why should you choose Site24x7 among others? Here are a few reasons:

• Enterprise grade
• Elastically scalable
• Robust
• Lightweight
• Small learning curve

Our server monitoring agent can also be installed on cloud VMs (in addition to our already comprehensive cloud monitoring platform) to provide OS-level performance metrics against the hypervisor level metrics, that can be deceptive. Every major cloud resource type can be monitored by Site24x7. Whether you use 100s of AWS services , 100s of Azure services , or multiple Google cloud resources, Site24x7 is still enough to fetch you every performance metric you want to see—from anywhere in the world, in one browser tab. Try our 30-day zero restrictions trial or opt for a personalized demo from our support team, which will be tailor made for your organization's IT infrastructure.

What's next for you?

Cloud migration best practices