Cloud computing is the availability of different services, including data storage, servers, software and databases, through the Internet. Cloud computing allows both enterprises and small businesses to minimize or even avoid upfront IT infrastructure costs, make their applications up and running faster, and helps their IT teams flexibly manage resources in accordance with demand, which is often changeable and unpredictable.

In most cases, cloud migration is the process of moving mission-critical operations from on-premises or legacy infrastructure to a virtual data center of a cloud provider, or from one cloud provider to another. It involves migrating your data, applications, databases, and IT processes to remote data centers.

Cloud migration is a great leap towards business digital transformation that changes the way the processes and policies flow.

Here are the most notable benefits of using cloud computing.

1. Agility and Scalability. Many CIOs see business agility as the main driver for adopting the cloud. Cloud services not only automatically scale capacity to meet growing or changing demand, but also enable teams to collaborate on app updates or troubleshoot issues from anywhere rather than locally. This level of continuity can give businesses a real competitive edge.

2. Reduced hosting costs. With the cloud, you no longer need to worry about the costs connected with maintaining physical servers. In this case, a third-party data center manages the servers – often on a subscription-based model – which reduces capital costs, converting them to operational costs. 3. Security. The cloud provides more security than data centers – sensitive data and applications are stored on a centralized basis. Most cloud providers also prevent unwanted traffic to your data by regularly updating their security systems, which helps you avoid threats and allows you to concentrate on important business processes. What’s more, for some utterly critical data, the so-called private clouds are at your disposal. Unlike public clouds, these clouds provide a high level of isolation and are available only to select users instead of the general public.

4. Disaster Recovery possibilities. This feature is important for businesses of all sizes, but it used to be unaffordable for small businesses until recently. Today, cloud computing is on the rise, helping more and more organizations to implement backup and recovery solutions and becoming less time and investment demanding. Among the most frequently used disaster recovery-related services are cross-cloud disaster recovery, when an organization’s workloads are deployed in multiple public clouds, and cloud backup, which refers to keeping data backed up on a remote server.

5. Resource savings. Since the cloud capacity is continuously adjusting to meet your organization’s needs, it utilizes resources that are necessary, which is much more efficient than having an enormous on-premises server infrastructure that requires high maintenance costs.

The cloud is a safe place to store mission-critical data, and now, given the rising popularity of the cloud, it surpassed the capabilities of most on-premises systems in terms of security. The recent pandemic gave a further boost to the even-rising cloud market, so many IT security companies decided to focus their RnD efforts on cloud computing security.

There are numerous cloud migration challenges that warrant careful planning, testing and resource allocation. We’ll consider the most important of them.

1. Downtime. During the migration process, you will most probably need to temporarily shut down your own servers. That being said, proper backups or resource allocation will be required to make sure that such downtime won’t have disastrous consequences for application performance and, thus, business operations.

2. Data loss. When moving to the cloud, your company’s data is at its most vulnerable. Some of it may become unavailable or be exposed to risk of unauthorized access. Special measures must be taken to minimize this risk — for instance, implementation of cloud security control procedures, such as privileged access management and application encryption.

3. Resource management. Let’s face it: not all IT professionals trust the cloud. Employees accustomed to managing physical servers may need training under the new circumstances. Sometimes the adoption of the cloud requires the introduction of new roles for IT resource management or the transformation of the very foundation of business operations.

4. Compatibility issues. In most cases, it will be challenging to get existing applications to interact properly with new cloud environments. This may require adapting your processes to those of your cloud provider — it entirely depends on the chosen cloud migration strategy.

It should be noted that those challenges can be successfully tackled with the help of proper cloud migration software. With it, companies can avoid downtime, minimize data loss risks, efficiently manage resources, and get rid of compatibility issue