When talking about adopting a cloud-based approach many discussion focus around cost reduction exercises and the transformation of CAPEX into OPEX.
A Cloud-based approach can deliver much more: although in some cases there might be some compliance requirement that would require an on premise setup, there are substantial benefits that a cloud based IT environment could provide over an on premise deployment:
Reliability: By taking advantage of data replication and geo-distribution in a network of regional datacenters around the globe Cloud based infrastructure can satisfy very demanding uptime standard for your services. With cloud storage services you would know that your data will be safe, even in in the event of a regional disaster.
Agility: You would like to experiment setting up a new Data warehouse but you might be concerned about the upfront investment required. With a Cloud based solution you can spin up only the service that you need to set up a Proof Of Concept and your data analytics team can start structuring a small dataset and experimenting with sophisticated machine learning services that the main cloud providers like AWS, Google and Microsoft are offering out of the box.
Scalability: A proof of concept in the Cloud can scale without mayor concerns to accommodate traffic growth. This could be performed distributing our workload to additional virtual machines or increasing RAM or CPU power to in real time to the virtual machines currently in use.
Elasticity: cloud services can scale up or down according to the workload they are receiving... some cloud services, like AWS Lambda, Azure Functions or Google Cloud Functions, are designed as severless. This mean that a sophisticated mechanism is working under the hood guaranteeing the capacity to accommodate any peak in traffic that a customer might experience.
In a nutshell the benefit of cloud computing as strictly related to the idea of lean startup:setting up something quickly, shortening the time to market and figuring out he best requirements and the best setup along the way. The speed of business has changed and the time spent in very detailed planning session is at significant risk of being lost.
Microsoft Team and Revolut represent two relevant example of the success of this approach: Microsoft team was able to face the massive growth of its active customer base when the COVID-19 and when pandemic started to affect severely western economies its platform was able to withstand a massive growth from 20 million daily active users in 2019 to 115 Millions daily active users in Q4 2020 (source: Microsoft). Revolut, on the other end, was able to grow its customer base up to 12 million active users guaranteeing a smooth onboarding experience and instantaneous processing of transactions.
A Cloud-based IT strategy was instrumental in delivering an astonishing customer experience and was one crucial building block in the foundation of their success.
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