Why cloud hosting should be in your organization’s roadmap

By: Patrick Higgins, Director of Cloud Services

Cloud continues to find its way into conversations in 2024, and for good reason. The advantages of hosting in the cloud are clear, including cost, scalability, and accessibility. Even so, as a hefty up-front investment in both time and resources, many organizations are resisting or pursuing alternative options for their applications.

According to Flexera, 58% of survey respondents are planning to migrate more workloads to the cloud in 2024. Whether as part of a mutli- or hybrid cloud structure or for standalone applications, we still think cloud is the best bet for many organization’s applications, especially when it comes to hosting your critical data.  

Scalability

The environments and expectations of businesses and organizations are rapidly changing. What worked last year may not be feasible this year due to a number of reasons; however, your user experience must be maintained and enhanced through optimizations and improvements. 

In addition, for on-prem hosting, hardware is purchased with a capacity more significant than what is currently needed. However, a recent trend our team is noticing with on-prem clients is the exceeded capacity or availability of an older appliance because of a large amount of organizational data. This results in the need to purchase an additional storage appliance and hope your organization’s data fits within the storage capacity available. 

Cloud hosting offers organizations the ability to scale their resources as needed. If there is a high demand for the content application within the cloud, they can expand usage. During slower periods, cloud hosting can be downsized to not only save costs, but the application can respond properly to the environment around them.

Cost

While hosting on-prem seems straightforward, there are a lot of underlying costs associated with it, including:

• Hardware investment, maintenance, and updates
• Resources such as hardware experts, training, and more
• Security tools, including things like climate control and building security so your hardware is kept safe and doesn’t overheat
• OnBase system maintenance and upgrades 

Not only are these up-front costs used for the initial purchase of infrastructure and set-up, it’s likely these costs will hang around in forms of annual costs for infrastructure, maintenance contracts, hardware leases, and expenses for replacing the hardware every three to five years. 

Many of these costs, like resources and security, are often included in cloud migration or eliminated completely because there are no hardware costs associated with cloud hosting. The DataBank Cloud takes it one step further by including your OnBase system maintenance, migrations, and upgrades in the cost.

Security

High availability and disaster recovery are among the main benefits of cloud hosting when it comes to accessibility. They provide failover mechanisms for organizations to allow for operational and accessible applications, even if hardware or other issues occur. With disaster recovery, you can restore your application and avoid any data loss.

Accessibility

Accessibility also offers an enhanced user experience due to the, accessibility of the content application, regardless of the user’s location. Accessing the content when and where they want it or need it is a crucial component to the changing work environment and increasing customer satisfaction. 

Cloud hosting is a no-brainer for many organizations, but there are also times when it might not be the best fit. Your budget, how you’re using your systems, and the size and scale of your applications all play a role. 

We consult on cloud hosting every day, whether that includes a move to our cloud or a different direction entirely. If you’d like to discuss what’s best for your organization, we’d be happy to help.