You may be hesitating about migrating your business to the cloud. 

It’s helpful to know that enterprises commonly use cloud computing. According to Forrester’s State of the Cloud in Canada, 2023 report, 84%  use hybrid cloud as their primary cloud computing platform.   

That’s because these enterprises see the cloud as an essential operating system for accelerating their business processes, driving innovation, and reinforcing their resilience.  

Furthermore, cloud computing will be even more important to these companies going forward. Consider these forecasts for 2028, made by the global technology research firm, Gartner:  

• Efforts to modernize business processes will lead to 70% of workloads running in a cloud environment, up from 25% in 2023. 
• AI-related workloads will drive over 50% of cloud compute resource usage, up from less than 10% in 2023. 

We cite these numbers because the benefits driving this increasing adoption of cloud computing by enterprises apply equally to your medium-sized business.  

Here are just six reasons why cloud computing will help your business thrive. 

1. Optimize your IT costs 

In the early days of cloud computing, businesses migrated to the cloud to save money. They could quickly adapt to peak workloads without having to over-invest in hardware and software. They only paid for what they used. As a result, their IT investment was transformed from a capital expense into an operating expense, which liberated funds leaders could allocate to other strategic projects. 

Today, the pressure to reduce costs and generate efficiencies is ever-present, but it is not the most important factor driving cloud migration. Significant savings do build over the medium term, once the time and costs of the initial cloud implementation have been absorbed. 

These savings are supported by cloud automation and AI tools that relieve your IT team of mundane low-value tasks like quality assurance and incident response. As a result, your team can work on higher-value tasks and contribute to your operation’s productivity. 

2. Accelerate innovation 

If your business does any software programming, your developers can test new features or applications in new instances in the cloud, without worrying about the limits of your hardware or sluggish procurement processes. 

Thus, you accelerate your speed to deployment or market, which shortens your time to value for the new software. 

3. Gain insights into your business 

When your business systems are unified in the cloud, you empower your company with a whole new toolkit that includes predictive analytics, AI, and machine learning algorithms.  

Take predictive analytics, for instance. These tools can process your vast trove of data to surface trends and insights about the efficiency of your operation. You can then test forecasting scenarios — let’s say in purchasing — in which you inject variables based on your history.  

The outcomes of these purchasing scenarios can offer insights that help you make more proactive buying decisions. As a result, you’ll be able to minimize the carrying costs of overstocked inventory or lost sales due to supply shortages.   

4. Benefit from more flexible compute capacity 

Every day your business generates ever more data. As you approach the ceiling of your on-premises compute capacity, you risk slowing or even shutting down your IT functions.  

The only way to avoid this dilemma is to provision more capacity, which involves thoughtful planning, capital investment, and slow procurement. Given today’s unpredictable surges and drops in demand, will your customers and profitability support this sluggish response?   

By operating your cloud migration, your capacity can be increased or decreased with a few clicks to meet your needs, economically.  

5. Take advantage of world-class cybersecurity 

Some IT professionals have a lingering perception that security in the cloud is an issue.  

While no IT infrastructure is immune from threat, it’s important to remember that the hyperscalers, such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, invest much more in cyber security (one billion USD annually by Azure) than any government department or medium-sized company. 

Security in the cloud is a major concern that is addressed at several key levels. It includes: 

• Physical protection with perimeter and data center security 
• Network security 
• Rigorous identity management 
• Authorization and access control 
• Infrastructure security covering both physical and virtual hosts 
• Application and data security 
• Audit and reporting for continuous monitoring and compliance with security standards 

These cloud service providers hire world-class security experts and employ automated tools to safeguard their systems full time. In contrast, your busy IT team has a full to-do list, and security is only one item on that list. So storing your company’s data in the cloud is most likely a big upgrade in security for your business.   

‘’Security is a major concern for both the customer and the cloud service provider. Leading providers, such as Azure and AWS, offer advanced security tools, often supported by artificial intelligence, to help their customers strengthen their security stance.’’ 

André Girard, Director of the AWS Center of Excellence at Cofomo 

These tools enable not only proactive detection of threats, but also rapid and effective response to security incidents, ensuring optimal protection in the cloud environment. 

6. Protect your competitive edge 

Over and above these business benefits of cloud adoption, your competition’s migration to the cloud may simply provide the biggest reason you’ll want to be there too. Otherwise, the playing field will tilt in their favour.  

Empowered by the cloud, your competitors can automate, monitor, analyze, streamline, and manage a slew of business processes. For example, they can do the following:  

• Enable the implementation of new services without having to plan the scale of the underlying infrastructure. The inherent flexibility of a cloud infrastructure means you can scale up or down as demand changes, all at the right time. 
• Use chatbots and virtual assistants to provide 24/7 customer support. 
• Analyze customer data, trends, and buying patterns to help their marketing team target customers and prospects with more personalized campaigns. 
• Forecast demand based on various scenarios to streamline inventory management and support timely deliveries for more satisfied customers. 
• Automate the quality assurance of software development using predictive models to reduce time-intensive manual testing. 

The list goes on and on. 

When your customers, investors, and employees observe this level of enhanced business performance in your competitors, what will their expectations be for your company? 

Cloud migration strategy made easy with an experienced IT partner 

We understand that the thought of cloud migration and its new way of working may evoke some concern, but the good news is you don’t have to dive into the deep end, and you don’t have to do it alone.  

A pilot project or a phased migration may be best for your business. As you expand your capabilities and reap the benefits of the cloud, you’ll continue to derive value from your on-premises IT infrastructure. 

Partner with an expert cloud migration and implementation team like our Centre of Excellence. Having worked with dozens of businesses over the years, we’ll walk with you step-by-step through the best practices of cloud migration and management. We’ll help train your team and answer all your questions.