Development and Testing

Development and testing servers are the perfect platform to showcase the benefits of cloud infrastructure. Typically, companies already use virtualization within their own data centers to deploy ephemeral dev, staging, and testing servers, so it’s not difficult to move from deploying those servers on self-managed hardware to a cloud platform.

The big win here is that the company no longer has to house and manage the physical hardware and benefits from the expertise and economies of scale of the cloud vendor.

Big Data Analytics

Big-Data-Analytics

Big data analytics typically involve large volumes of data with highly variable compute and storage workloads. A public cloud platform offers excellent efficiencies for variable workloads and deployments can be scaled up and down depending on current demand.

Big data applications are largely platform agnostic: they’ll run just as well on cloud servers as they do in an in-house data center, with the obvious benefit that the company doesn’t have to make a capital investment for infrastructure to support peak loads.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)

Virtual desktops are another application that’s relatively easy to move to a cloud platform and provides a host of easy wins for the company. Centralized virtual desktop infrastructure can be more efficiently managed and secured, offering considerable cost savings for IT and support departments.

For end-users, the experience doesn’t change substantially, the same applications and operating systems are available, but their virtual desktop environment can be accessed from any location, on any device — enhancing the company’s ability to efficiently manage office space, computers, and worker time.

Cloud adoption needn’t be a once-and-for-all process. Every company has internal services that could be made more efficient, functional, and cost-effective by moving them to the cloud.