You may not realize it, but your legacy IT infrastructure may be limiting your ability to reach your business goals. There’s no better time to learn about the benefits of hosting applications in the cloud.
“It has been a dream for us,” the CEO of Gatesway Foundation explained of the non-profit’s leap from an outdated, server-based traditional hosting IT infrastructure to a robust, cloud-based server infrastructure for its enterprise resource planning software. When making the switch, you could opt for a dedicated server in private cloud, or a shared multi-tenant solution in public cloud. Either way, by hosting applications in the cloud, you can improve business management software and automate back-office functions.
A simple swap from legacy infrastructure to the cloud isn’t always easy. A cloud migration strategy will help you determine the key steps needed to make the move. This includes defining the 7 Rs of a migration strategy (rehost, replatform, refactor) for each of your applications. Once you have this figured out, you’ll be able to enjoy the advantages of cloud hosting.
Hosting applications via a cloud service allows organizations to align business applications with IT and digital transformation initiatives, improve availability and reliability, simplify application delivery and end-user access, and enhance business continuity.
Why you should consider hosting applications in the cloud
1. Ensure high availability and reliability
Applications in the cloud are often more reliable than software running on in-house infrastructure. A provider who specializes in cloud hosting offers redundant infrastructure and dedicated personnel with the specific skill sets and resources needed to ensure continuous availability. Service-level agreements will guarantee 24/7/365 and 99.9% availability of your applications in real-time.
2. Simplify application delivery across the user base
With web-enabled applications, local installation becomes a thing of the past. Applications in the cloud ensure that all of your employees and partners are using the same version of software – including security and feature updates – without depending on users to do anything.
3. Improve application access and connectivity
The right people have access to the right information at the right time. Ease of access and ease of use are greatly improved when a business application is web-enabled and hosted in the cloud. Mobile? Off-site? Working from home? Traveling? Having your application in the cloud means employees can access work from anywhere in the world with any device that can connect to the internet. Everyone can get the information they need when they need it, without having to remember to download it in advance.
4. Reduce IT operations headaches
Time and resources spent maintaining hardware and concerns over lack of redundancy can be major stressors for IT when self-hosting a legacy platform. Imagine, no more worries about pushing multiple servers to the end of their useful lives.
When you host your applications in the cloud, especially if they are hosted in a managed provider’s cloud, you allow more time for your IT staff to focus on revenue-generating projects. By outsourcing mundane and time-consuming operational tasks to a managed cloud provider, you can have someone else take over the operational headaches.
5. Reduce IT infrastructure costs
Eliminating hardware makes cloud application hosting a smart financial decision for many businesses. The elastic pricing of the cloud may reduce your outlay for IT equipment, high-cost data center facilities to store it, and staff to maintain it. Elasticity lets you only pay for what you use. Save yourself from capital expenditure, investing too much in soon-to-be-obsolete hardware to deliver maximum capacity data storage “just in case.”
6. Safeguard disaster recovery and backup
The cloud is disaster-ready, cutting your risks significantly. Of all the benefits of hosting your application in the cloud, effective DR may be the most critical. Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) with cloud-to-cloud recovery can replicate systems from any cloud, help restore day-to-day and sensitive information, and failover to another cloud in minutes.
An IT manager will likely always remember the day a mission-critical system crashed. When the system went down, business came to a halt. It’s likely the organization could never restore all of the lost information – some of it was simply lost to the ether. Failure to recover is much more likely to occur when critical applications are hosted in-house than in a cloud.
See how we helped a non-profit organization move to the cloud
TierPoint client, The Anchor Group, helped Gatesway Foundation modernize their back-office applications to gain the operational benefits of cloud computing. Anchor provides a robust flexible solution for their client with the help of TierPoint’s Multitenant cloud.
Are you considering cloud application hosting?
Do you have applications that would be more useful in the cloud? We can help make that a reality. At TierPoint, we offer customized IT services including managed hosting and application management to support an organization through your cloud migration. Our team of cloud advisors can help you to work through your cloud strategy and consider your options. Contact us today to learn more.