6 Cloud Migration Benefits You Might Not Have Considered

Remember when you first met your significant other? Perhaps you were attracted to her smile, his sense of humor, her intelligence, or the fact he doesn't still live with his parents. But as you got to know each other, you discovered there was a lot more to love about this person than just the stuff on the surface.

The cloud is the same way. There are the obvious and highly touted benefits, such as scalability, reliability, lower costs, improved analytics, and disaster recovery. However, after a cloud migration, many companies discover unforeseen advantages and business solutions that didn't even factor into their decision to make the switch.

If your company is thinking about moving certain workloads or systems to the cloud, here are six hidden benefits you could soon be enjoying:

1. Improved IT Resource Management

As business technology has evolved, so has the role of IT workers. Once upon a time, their job was primarily to maintain servers, troubleshoot office equipment, and ask "Have you restarted your computer?" countless times a day. These days, IT workers have taken on the role of resident rock stars — they're the experts who help your company leverage the latest technology, develop new business applications, and drive innovation. However, the majority of IT resources still get sapped by routine maintenance, such as installing updates, maintaining servers, and troubleshooting faulty applications.

Cloud migrations unburden IT teams from many of these tasks. They can then spend more time and money on new, strategic projects that contribute to the company's bottom line.

2. Increased Mobility

The cloud doesn't just make your IT department more productive — it also boosts productivity across the organization by letting staff access data and business applications from any location via any connected device.

For knowledge workers, this means snow days no longer mean a whole day's worth of work to catch up on, and travel time is no longer downtime. Employees in the field spend fewer hours on the phone with the home office or digging through email to find the information they need. And, when staff members experience real computer problems — you know, the ones that can't be fixed by turning them off and on again — they can work from their mobile devices while IT gets their computers back online.

3. Larger Talent Pool

There are plenty of fish in the sea, but the best fish for the job might not live in your particular pond. Since cloud migration makes it easy for employees to work from anywhere, you can hire from anywhere, too. So, whether new employees are based in London, Kentucky, or London, England, you can set them up with telecommuting technology and heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it's off to work they go.

Likewise, if valuable employees move away or simply prefer to work from home, there's no need to incur the costs of finding and training new talent.

4. Collective IT Insight

Think about the last time you saw someone step in a puddle or trip over something. While you were trying not to laugh, you were probably also thinking, "I'm glad it wasn't me."

Cloud services and applications are constantly being improved, updated, and expanded upon based on customer feedback and experimentation. Because these are shared resources, you benefit from the knowledge that comes with other users' trials and errors, their setbacks and successes, and their collective innovation. After all, it's usually more efficient to learn from others' mistakes and insights than your own.

5. Easier Mergers and Acquisitions

Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) can be an exciting time for companies, since they offer opportunities to grow, expand, and make a bigger impact on the world. But getting data and apps from two companies' servers to play nice is just as much fun as a root canal — and takes a lot longer.

It often takes merging companies months or even years to move their data from one legacy system to another. The time and resources it takes to do so has caused more than one M&A deal to fall through.

When data and business systems are in the cloud, the transition can happen much faster, and employees from both newly joined organizations can immediately access the information and apps they need to keep working at full speed.

6. Reduced Carbon Footprint

Running onsite servers and an offsite disaster recovery system for your data center consumes a lot of energy, especially for larger enterprises. With cloud-based data storage, your server capacity scales to fit your current needs so you don't use more energy than necessary. This helps your company go greener while also saving some green on the power bill.

It's no secret that the cloud offers plenty of benefits, but some of its most touted highlights barely scratch the surface. Your company's cloud migration might just reveal a few hidden gems, too.

To learn more about the many benefits of cloud migration, speak to a Vonage Business consultant today.