Is cloud migration high on your agenda for 2018? Recent findings by Microsoft indicate that the proportion of small and medium businesses using cloud-based applications is set to grow from a benchmark 37 percent in 2016 to an estimated 78 percent by 2020. With continuing pressure on IT budgets and business demands for greater mobility, availability and agility, cloud migration is set to remain a strategic priority.

So what’s your 2018 resolution – reduce costs, simplify IT management, get better alignment between business and IT, or push ahead with digital transformation?

Certainly, cost reduction is a continuing theme. Moving applications and services to a hosted provider in the cloud reduces infrastructure and support requirements. It also cuts maintenance and upgrade costs, and improves IT productivity. According to Microsoft figures, average savings of around 20 percent are possible following cloud migration.

Identify Priorities

The question then is what to move. For many businesses the priorities have been web hosting, productivity solutions and email hosting – the day-to-day business services that help employees work more efficiently. And, cloud adds the extra benefit of anywhere, anytime access to services and applications, which is vital if your business needs to support efficient, productive mobile and remote working.

Business-critical services have historically seen lower levels of cloud adoption, due in part to concerns about stability and security. However, recent developments in cloud-based mainframe technology have made migration a more practical proposition. If you’re concerned about lack of scale, skills shortages or the cost of maintaining legacy systems on-premise, cloud migration opens new opportunities, as we explained in a recent blog ‘Mainframe in the Cloud.’

Simplify IT Management

For many organizations, simplifying IT management is a priority. Day-to-day operational and maintenance tasks consume too much IT time, particularly when business is demanding the highest levels of availability and faster delivery of new services. Skills shortages for both emerging and legacy technologies only increase the problem. And that’s why simplifying IT management is a leading driver for cloud migration.

Moving to the cloud hands responsibility for those day-to-day tasks to a provider with the specialist skills and resources to handle them efficiently, freeing the IT team to focus on more strategic tasks. In planning for 2018, it’s important to look at how your team spends its time, and how you could change.

Align IT with Business

Aligning IT with business is another key driver for cloud. Business leaders want to improve the customer experience and improve workforce productivity. That means ensuring the highest levels of availability and access. Cloud provides the flexibility and scalability to match capacity and availability with demand. It can also provide an additional level of business continuity in the event of a problem on-premise.

Cloud migration can offer a wide range of benefits to your business in 2018 by simplifying IT management, reducing costs, and increasing agility and availability. But, migration itself can be a time-consuming, disruptive process. So, when you have set your cloud targets for 2018, consider partnering with a team of migration specialists like VTG.

Our experienced professionals provide end-to-end support for your cloud migration using a phased approach to cover the key stages of discovery, assessment, planning, preparation, testing, migration and verification. By using automation tools like ZENfra, our teams ensure a smooth, cost-effective transition to the cloud with minimal downtime.

Find out more

If you would like to know more about our cloud migration services, please check out the articles and infographics on our website.