Data centre exit: could you benefit from moving to the cloud?

Are you being held hostage by your data centre service provider?

For many companies, coming to the end of your data centre contract is a big opportunity to move to the cloud.

Having been locked into often expensive and ever-increasing costs, the motivation for exploring the benefits of an infrastructure migration to the cloud becomes paramount.

Growing capacity

Rising costs generally come from growing capacity with increased requirement for hardware and more support being billed.

In traditional IT environments, provisioning resource can take days or weeks with heavy bureaucracy only increasing the stress and cost.

With cloud computing using the Microsoft Azure cloud for example, capacity issues can be resolved in minutes, and worries about acquiring hardware and provisioning become a thing of the past.

If your business is coming to the end of its data centre contract, the key thing is to spend time evaluating your best options for the future, rather than rushing to renegotiate the next handcuff multi-year deal.

Hybrid solution

You don’t have to throw the bath out with the bath water: setting up a hybrid solution can utilise existing infrastructure and the data sets.

Dev/Test workloads are great candidates to start your cloud journey quickly. The benefits of these workloads allow for a low risk entry point to the cloud with the added bonus of freeing up hardware resources on premises.

Workloads can be optimised and modernised over a period of time to take advantage of serverless compute models.

These require less maintenance and can increase security and reliability as well as reduce the total cost of ownership.

Rich data set

Companies often find that this approach enables stability, with a rich set of data dashboards and applications that improve analytics to build greater productivity and automation.

The key is the strategy phase: digging deep into what your business requires in the long-term.

What benefits are you looking for in terms of governance, cost savings and capabilities? How do you align the right people and measure costs.

Actionable plan

It is important to document motivations, business outcomes and technical considerations in order to build an actionable plan that gets buy-in across the organisation.

In our next blog, we will look at the steps that should be taken to build a cloud migration strategy that will take advantage of the benefits of cloud technology and release you from the constraints of data centre contracts.

For more information on how LA NET can help you plan and support you on your cloud journey, click here.