Cloud services are one of the main resources for a company's digital transformation . Their capabilities provide the flexibility and accessibility needed for smoother processes, and with minimal upfront investment cost, as they completely remove capital expenditure from the equation.

It depends on the needs of your company.

Can your business afford downtime and reduced productivity if systems go down due to a power or internet outage? If so, cloud solutions are not suitable. If you need 9.99% uptime, the cloud is the place for you. If your business can withstand an outage for a couple of hours until your internet service is back up or until you solve, for example, a hardware failure, stick with your on premise infrastructure.

• A private cloud solution could be an option, as it tends to incorporate more internal hardware.
• A public cloud solution, for example, would be an option if you need to remain flexible and increase or decrease your cloud storage as needed. Public clouds offer a wider range of service levels for businesses through the ability to host their data on external servers and equipment, which are managed by a service provider. It is a cost-effective way to start expanding the IT structure and to migrate certain workloads to the cloud. This way, customers only have to pay for the use of the resources they consume, such as CPU, memory, storage, bandwidth consumed, etc.

For companies with large amounts of data in remote locations or that need rapid scalability options, this is especially useful because it can take less time than other solutions due to automation and elasticity technologies that facilitate rapid and dynamic scaling.

For some smaller organisations there may also be security benefits if they are concerned about managing all the necessary hardware locally.

• The private cloud is a good option for those who own their own equipment, but it also comes with higher upfront costs that many companies cannot afford.
• A public solution is more affordable than a private one; however, it has fewer physical security measures compared to alternatives when dealing with sensitive data such as customer information or confidential business documents.
• A public cloud service for your infrastructure deployment can be deployed faster and is more scalable than on-premises deployment. As a result, users can access the public cloud from anywhere in the world with Internet access via an application or browser.
• A hybrid cloud solution, on the other hand, is an option for many companies looking to get more value from their technology investments while lowering risk and maximising uptime by adding redundancy through off-site data backups.

Hybrid cloud gives you the best of both private cloud and public cloud. That is, you can manage your most important information in a secure, unshared cloud, managed by you, while other less important workloads are hosted in a public cloud.

1. Maintenance-free

The company does not have to do anything, the maintenance of both hardware and software is taken care of by the cloud provider.

2. Maximum uptime with no risk of failures

Most public cloud services guarantee more than 99% uptime without risk of interruption. As the overall cloud system connects different servers, the moment one server fails, another one will absorb the workload. This is definitely a guarantee of constant performance at critical times.

3. Quick and easy configuration

The public cloud can be conveniently set up in just a few minutes and, more importantly, remotely.

4. Availability

You can access your data from any platform with an internet connection at any time.

5. Flexibility

The public cloud can be complemented by a private cloud solution, so you can design your own hybrid infrastructure to suit your business needs.

Yes, migrating to the cloud is a possible path to digital transformation and meets the expectations of companies seeking greater innovation. But there is also the financial aspect to consider, the return on investment.

To calculate ROI, divide the result of the return on investment minus the costs by the cost of the investment. The result is expressed as a percentage or ratio. An index greater than 0 indicates that the return is greater than the cost, so the investment would be beneficial.

Is the ROI of the cloud really that obvious, and is there a cost saving if I host my servers in the cloud instead of buying them and having them on premise in my company?

There are different online resources to calculate ROI, such as this TCO Calculator. You simply have to enter the different parameters and at the end you will get an estimate. An example of On Premise vs Cloud is the one carried out by Inforges, which clearly shows a positive ROI:

What should we take into account when comparing costs?

• Return on Investment - ROI: A well-known benchmark used to estimate the return on an investment, compared to the initial amount invested.
• Total Cost of Ownership - TCO: A projection of the expenses associated with the acquisition, implementation, use and removal of a product or equipment.
• Payback period: A calculation of the number of years needed for the equipment to pay for itself, also known as the "break-even point".
• Shelf life: The useful life of a product, measured in terms of time (hours, days, months, years) or cycles.
• Residual value: What the equipment is worth when it reaches the end of its useful life with respect to its specific application.

What should my cloud migration strategies be?

Hybrid cloud: A subset of the cloud computing model, meaning that one part is located on a customer's premises and the other in a data centre shared with other organisations. The two parts may be connected by LAN or WAN connections (often referred to as "private" and "public").

A broad term that applies to any combined solution that incorporates aspects of both private and public clouds. Hybrid can include co-location at third-party data centre providers with on-premises backup, as well as the use of SaaS components such as Exchange Online or Office 365.

Private cloud: When an organisation decides to move some IT functions to its own infrastructure, using virtualisation software, it offers certain advantages over traditional outsourcing models because no third party has access to sensitive corporate data. This strategy also allows companies greater control over technical performance characteristics, such as storage capacity and bandwidth limits.

The hosting of hardware, software and data on leased or owned servers that are maintained by an organisation.

Public cloud: Providers typically offer three types of public clouds: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS).

Hybrid cloud: A hybrid approach can be considered when an organisation has a significant need for resources that wants to retain the flexibility to grow, but also needs another provider with more specialised capabilities.

A private or public cloud computing service. In this type of environment, IT departments lease infrastructure and software from a provider and manage their own data.

Finally, here are some tips and conclusions to consider when migrating to the cloud:

Conclusion and Tips if you are considering migrating your company's services to the cloud

Unlike public cloud users, private cloud users are responsible for monitoring and securing the entire physical infrastructure, among other things. And although a hybrid cloud offers the best of both cloud worlds (a mix of private and public cloud services with orchestration between them), performance issues such as latency and dependency may still arise.

Once you have considered the data, costs, security and migration challenges, it is time to draw up a migration plan. An important aspect of this plan is deciding what to do with local servers. In some cases, companies donate or sell idle hardware.