Whitepaper: Making the Case for the Cloud

Introduction

As organizations evaluate their IT infrastructures, leaders are likely given numerous reasons to migrate to the cloud. If they still haven’t made up their minds, though, it’s clear that the rationale is falling on deaf ears. In this whitepaper, we’ll explore what it takes to convince leadership that migrating to the cloud is the best possible option for their organization:

• Security: When surveyed by Deloitte, 58% of IT professional respondents believed that data protection prompted the cloud migration, as a modernized infrastructure can improve overall security posture

• Resiliency: Proper disaster recovery is the best way to keep a company up and running immediately following a crisis and the cloud provides flexibility

• Optimization: Eliminate wasted infrastructure resources by selecting, provisioning, and right-sizing your environment in the cloud

• Costs: Change IT economics from CAPEX to OPEX, improve budgeting and allow your IT resources to be allocated with precision

• Industry-Proven Strategy: Outsourced teams can help organizations pinpoint an effective strategy that can be implemented quickly

60% of businesses have already moved at least a portion of their workloads to the cloud, which is a powerful statistic for any leader. This isn’t about following the herd, though – it’s about recognizing when it’s time for a change. Upgrading technology takes effort, but it’s also one of the best ways to stay competitive.

Proof Point #1: Cloud Infrastructure Can Protect Against Modern-Day Threats

Cloud infrastructures – much like on premises infrastructures – is what you make of it. Just as you can leave the building unlocked for criminals to stop by, you can choose not to implement any security features in the cloud. The goal for organizations should be to choose a platform that introduces layers of security and provides protection against modern attacks. Each new challenge – or security layer – is another reason for a hacker to move on.

When you consider how attackers may infiltrate your systems, the possibilities are truly endless. Some hackers use social phishing tactics. For example, sending emails disguised as an email from a supervisor. Others will exploit an IoT device and use that opening to access the entire network. Hackers can force account access, steal credentials, or talk their way into inside information — and those are just the external possibilities. You also have to consider the potential of internal sabotage as well.

Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 make it possible for organizations to keep themselves out of harm’s way based on the security tools available. When correctly deployed and configured, these tools can help ensure the organization’s security profile is as robust as it can be. Knowing which applications to use and where they should be integrated into your systems takes a certain degree of expertise, but when done correctly, the results are unparalleled.

Proof Point #2: Expand Disaster Recovery (DR) Functionality and Improve Business Resiliency

Power outages, employee sabotage, flooding: there are a number of events that can cause your business to either slow down or crash to a halt entirely. The point of disaster recovery is to plan ahead for different
scenarios, so you can get back to business as quickly as possible. The cloud is considered ideal for this. In a recent survey by Veeam on Cloud Data Protection, they found that:
• 67% of organizations use cloud services as part of their DR strategy.
• 42% of IT leaders name hybrid-cloud workload protection as the most important component
of enterprise backup.
• 40% of servers have had at least one outage per year.
• 20% of IT implementers reported that improving reliability (RPO/RTO) is a key driver of changing their
backup solution in 2022.

Disaster recovery principles illustrate that moving to the cloud is a starting point that can be built upon to include additional disaster recovery capabilities. Organizations need to protect themselves from any number of unexpected occurrences.

We cannot stress enough that when you’re making the case for migration, you need to stress how protection and backups function and the need for additional protections. Unfortunately, there are a lot of misconceptions about this. For instance, there is an assumption that data is automatically backed up if they’re in Microsoft 365. The truth is their data is only available for 30 days before disappearing.

It’s important for everyone to do their homework on these matters, so there are no unpleasant surprises. To support data protection and DRaaS, with the cloud you can select a data center in one region for production and a second in a geographical
dispersed location for redundancy.

Download the full Making the Case for Cloud Whitepaper to access more proof points to help you make the case for cloud.