To the Cloud?

You may be asking yourself, "Why should I put my servers in the cloud?". There are numerous reasons to make the move to the cloud, but one of the most compelling is cost efficiency. If you were to buy a physical server for each server need, you would be fronting the cost for more capacity than you need, for something that has a finite life, and for something that will likely need to be replaced at the end of that useful life. If you can instead put that server in the cloud, it’s possible to only utilize the resources needed. In addition, you would only pay for it as long as you need it, which could be anywhere from one month to ten years and beyond.

Another reason for provisioning servers in the cloud is the flexibility that is offered. If you deploy a physical server on-premise, the role of that server, as well as its location, are quite inflexible. In the cloud, you can provision a server much more quickly and then "re-provision" it at the drop of a hat if a change is needed. If you were using physical hardware, this re-provisioning process is much more difficult and time-consuming (if it is even possible).

In addition to flexibility, a virtual machine in the cloud can offer stability. Any time a significant change is expected, a snapshot can be taken of the machine prior to making the change. Then, if a problem is encountered with the modification, you can revert to the snapshot, thus restoring the machine back to its original state. This game-changing functionality is not available in most physical server environments.

While no one can offer a true, 100% uptime guarantee, cloud services can approach this goal more closely than any physical office. When a physical office loses power or connectivity, most on-premise resources become inoperable or inaccessible. With cloud solutions, your business can continue as long as connectivity exists.  Cloud services providers build in much more redundancy than businesses with on-premise data centers (or closets as it were). Reliability is their lifeblood.  If they are not reliable, they do not survive, so they make the required investments in reliability and security. Heck, a cloud service like Amazon is "redundantly redundant". And if a rare cloud datacenter outage was a concern, you could overcome this fear by employing an approach which included replicating data to another geographically-disparate data center.

Most, if not all, of the top companies in the world have a significant cloud presence. Smaller companies can and should leverage the same benefits provided by this transformative platform.