Peak Performance Blog

As the use of cloud computing continues to grow, organizations are putting more of their workloads in public clouds and pursuing multi-cloud strategies that will hopefully generate lower costs, increase agility and provide greater flexibility. However, that is not always the case as the cloud journey can become quite bumpy and the need for a cloud provider can become urgent.

“Every company, regardless of size is doing something in the Cloud!”

With that spot on proclamation from Auxis Technology Leader and moderator, Alvaro Prieto, The Auxis CIO Breakfast Roundtable on How to Maximize your Cloud, was officially off and running.

The demand for cloud services continues to soar. Gone are the days when “the cloud” was simply a mysterious space to be feared or a worn-out buzzword to be ignored. 
Today’s executives are increasingly adopting cloud computing across their entire organization and leveraging everything the service has to offer.
In the process, they are improving business agility, lowering operational costs and increasing their propensity for innovation.

Millions of organizations have now adopted cloud computing, but many are still missing out on the full spectrum of benefits that the cloud can deliver.

The truth is, many executives wrongly believe that running their workloads in the cloud is far simpler than it actually is and end up paying the price later. They move into the cloud with incorrect assumptions and take many missteps along the way.

It’s well understood that securing your AWS cloud applications is important and that it needs to be front and center. This is especially true for companies that primarily generate business through their applications and websites, such as online retailers and SaaS providers.

So, you made the leap and picked the right cloud provider or providers to migrate your workloads to, and everything is all set. NOT REALLY.

While many organizations have already moved at least some of their business workloads to public cloud infrastructure, some of you are just beginning the journey. The benefits are clear: elimination of capital expenditure on infrastructure, instant access to applications and data from any device wherever a user is on the network, additional agility to create and remove infrastructure as needed, improved collaboration and productivity, better security, unlimited storage and simple backup and recovery, and of course the cost advantages of paying only for the highly scalable resources you actually consume. Sounds great, but the next big question is which cloud provider should you choose.

There's no question that IT security trends are constantly changing. For instance, think back to early 2000’s when we had applications running on physical servers in an on-premises datacenter. Basic security measures were put in place to prevent the virus, malware, and network penetration attacks through perimeter-based software tools and physical appliances. Attacks were noisy, but once cleaned up, did not leave much damage. That all changed in the mid-2000's with the emergence of virtualization, as well as the proliferation of mobile devices, and security evolved to adapt to this changing paradigm.

If the cloud is not on your roadmap, it should be. While server sales are falling flat, the cloud market is booming. In fact, Gartner predicts that the worldwide public cloud market alone will grow 17.2 percent in 2016 to $208.6 billion, up from $178 billion in 2015. Of that, the highest growth will come from infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), with the firm estimating a jump in sales of 42.8 percent in 2016.  Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is also expected to grow significantly in 2016 - at a rate of 21.7 percent - to reach $38.9 billion.  With these staggering projections, as well as the fact that Amazon AWS reported 2015 sales of $7.88 billion in 2015, cloud is something no business can afford to ignore.

 Nearly half of medium and large enterprises in the US (47%) ranked increased efficiency as the main benefit of cloud infrastructure usage, according to a new survey of 300 enterprises conducted by Clutch. Security (45%) and data storage (41%) followed to fill out the top three benefits of cloud computing in the enterprise market.

Traditionally, the day after Thanksgiving in the U.S.  – commonly known as “Black Friday” – is viewed as a kickoff to the busiest shopping season of the year, leading up to Christmas.  For many retailers, this period is a “make or break” time of year.

Here are three myths-- and the truths that go with them -- to help you make a more informed decision when it’s time for your business to jump into this rapidly-expanding technology: