5 benefits of public cloud computing

Considering a move to public cloud? It’s come a long way – first, from primarily a place for IT to test and develop applications – to now supporting enterprise resource planning (ERP) software suites and other mission-critical enterprise workloads in a proven, stable and secure production environment.

There are many business benefits of moving your applications and workloads to public cloud, and you may be wondering which will apply to your organization.

With a well-planned and executed migration that’s aligned to business goals, you can enjoy benefits including:

1. Scalability

Often, the greatest allure of public cloud is that it offers an on-demand, hyper-scale environment. Gone are the days of estimating your future needs and paying upfront for hardware and storage capacity you may never use. Leveraging public cloud, you can increase (or decrease) resources automatically and dynamically, in response to changing business needs and dynamic market conditions – scaling applications, users and workloads to remain agile and drive competitive advantage.

2. Simplified disaster recovery

With literally a few clicks of a button, you can automate backing up your data, applications and other resources across global public cloud regions. It’s easy. Unlike on-premises disaster recovery, you don’t have to worry about maintaining equipment in multiple data centers and paying for associated staffing and infrastructure costs. Public cloud providers offer automated, scalable disaster recovery services, delivering redundancy and geographic diversity to support business continuity and compliance strategies.

3. Cost savings

A move to public cloud can result in significant cost savings – eliminating hardware and associated maintenance costs, and reducing expenses related to storage, networking, software licenses and more. Pay-as-you-go packages enable you to pay only for the resources that you need.

A word to the wise, though – a move to public cloud isn’t an automatic guarantee of cost reductions. In fact, a hasty “lift-and-shift” strategy could actually cost your business more or introduce security holes. Managed services providers such as NTT DATA can help with cloud cost optimization, with consolidation during a migration and post-migration that includes regular right- and tight-sizing reviews.

4. Staying up to date

When deploying applications on-premises, updating and maintaining them is often time- and resource-intensive. In contrast, the operating systems, applications and services available in public cloud – including security, cloud-native development, application monitoring and management, AI, big data analytics and more – are typically the latest and greatest available. For organizations that like to be on the cutting edge and enjoy access to new tools and enhancements from an ecosystem of vendors and developers supporting the public cloud, this is often a key benefit.

5. Resource optimization

Whether on-premises or in a private data center environment, companies managing their own infrastructure typically need larger staffs and have higher employee costs, given the specialization required (for storage, networking, virtualization, DevOps and more). In public cloud, many formerly time-intensive and error-prone activities can be automated over infrastructure the cloud provider is responsible for maintaining. It’s then easy for organizations to programmatically deploy (or undeploy) resources, scale applications and adapt capacity, without putting a drain on IT. Importantly, IT staff can also be freed up to address more strategic and revenue-generating activities.

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Of course, there are many more benefits of transitioning to public cloud – from high availability to no capital investments to future-proofing your business and more. These are just a few.

We work with organizations worldwide every day to help them unlock the full benefits of the cloud – and chart the public cloud (or private, hybrid or multicloud) journey that’s right for their business. From cloud planning to migration, and from management to modernization, we help our clients reduce costs and complexities, increase scalability and resilience, and realize their business goals.