Why business has moved to the cloud - SABSA Tutorial

- [Announcer] When cloud technology first emerged it was enthusiastically sold as a low cost way of business acquiring solutions outside of the bureaucracy of IT management with none of the delays that occur in organic IT acquisitions. Unlike many new technology launches, this was more understatement than hyperbole. Over time, cloud's popularity with the business increased and it became generally accepted as a technology option by IT, but continued to be viewed with suspicion by government security agencies because of the risk of losing data sovereignty. As an internet access technology, it also did not win favor with security teams who were dealing with a rapidly growing threat from cyber attack and tended to focus on its risks rather than ways to secure its deployment. Nevertheless, the use of cloud has continued to grow. In their 2020 State of the Cloud Report, Flexera report that 93% of enterprises embrace multi-cloud services, 87% use hybrid cloud strategies, and most used both public and private forms of cloud. 47% of enterprises expect cloud growth over the next year. Businesses see cloud services as offering a number of business benefits. Cloud is often sold as a means of achieving business agility. This is a key benefit as it enables improved time to market, which in turn provides revenue growth and lower cost to deliver. Cloud solutions can deliver significant user productivity gains, particularly where branch office access to the solution would otherwise require enterprise managed VPN and remote desktop access, with often limited bandwidth and unreliable access services. Mobility with flexible access is a key business benefit. The access anytime, anywhere paradigm that comes with an internet-based cloud has been a major improvement over office-bound solutions, particularly for on the road staff. Cloud service providers depend for their existence upon the availability and responsiveness of their services, and some are more reliable than onsite services. Cloud providers expect to deliver five nines, or 99.999% availability, whereas on premise solutions rarely achieved 99.9%. This is particularly relevant with software upgrades where on-premise software patches and upgrades are significantly more likely to have problems and disrupt services. Scalability is a significant benefit for cloud where increased workload, particularly surgeries around special marketing campaigns can be handled dynamically rather than requiring advance IT planning and acquisition. In addition, there's the financial benefit of not having to acquire and run a high watermark level of IT. Cloud services generally fall into operational costs, not capital, and therefore favor organizations that have limited CapEx budgets. The use of dedicated or per business service cloud workloads rather than having to apportion common IT costs makes business division cost accounting more accurate. License compliance is avoided when using cloud software services as the cost of licenses is built into the service cost. However, licenses for software deployed by the enterprise onto a cloud infrastructure still need to be accounted for. The bureaucracy and cost of IT is reduced when businesses adopt cloud deployments. Avoiding the cost and risk associated with software maintenance make cloud a compelling solution. In-house solutions take time to patch and upgrade, incur downtime, and often have release issues. Not so with cloud. As a result, IT departments can be smaller and incur reduced costs, as much of their workload is removed. Self-service or business onboarding and termination of users through cloud applications avoids the delays caused by workflows requiring IT involvement in setting up account. Security initially was a significant deterrent for establishing cloud deployments, but has subsequently been an advantage because of the significant resources cloud providers put into securing their services. Cloud service providers generally maintain a high level of formal security certification for their services and have been responsive to data sovereignty issues with in country services being provided. However, data breach incidents related to cloud services continue to occur and this highlights the need for enterprises to maintain their share of responsibility for security of their cloud deployment. Having cloud available, particularly in a business self-service form, removes the risk of shadow IT. While businesses can deploy their own cloud services, security can monitor the complete deployment landscape and ensure security is properly managed across it. There can be cost benefits in using cloud ranging from reduced IT acquisition costs to smaller IT departments, but the cost associated with cloud may not always be clear. In some cases, on premise solutions may be cheaper and more effective to deploy. Hardware costs relate to deployment of infrastructure, which is a discreet cost for infrastructure or platform as a service, but is hidden in the software as a service model. The newer serverless cloud services also hide any hardware costs. System software costs are included in the platform and software as a service models, so are not separately charged. The application cost for software as a service covers the full software stack. On-premise solutions also involve additional costs related to the ongoing management of patches and upgrades which generally occur at no cost in the cloud. Cloud services require internet access for both users and on-site systems, and so the cost of this needs to be taken into account. At the same time, the cost of internal networks may change up or down depending upon the deployment configuration. The cost of data transfer into and out of the cloud is a significant factor which can easily be underestimated. Storage services, including backups, are services which incur volumetric charges, and hybrid solutions have additional costs due to the need for on-premise integration. This can be more costly for cloud integration than for integration of a new on-premise solution.