The investment industry is at an inflection point. Firms are shifting away from their legacy private cloud providers to powerful public cloud models. Spearheading this charge toward innovation and cutting-edge security are leading investment firms that have fully embraced new technologies and comprehensive solutions offered by public cloud service providers.
This transition is due to the numerous challenges that businesses currently relying on private cloud environments are facing.
From costly downtime and security failures to minimal authority over data and exorbitant pricing, these are just a few fundamental private cloud challenges that are motivating companies to switch to a public cloud.
In today’s blog, we’ve outlined five telltale signs that your firm is on a legacy cloud environment and how new technologies can address your current solution’s shortcomings.
1. Outage Nightmares and Costly Downtime
Let’s say your private cloud provider suffers an outage for three hours. How much in lost revenue will that cost your hedge fund? If your traders could not perform when the bell rings, would that impact your business?
Automaticity is becoming a key driver in the success of modern businesses. Therefore, when an outage freezes critical business applications, that halts the performance and output of algorithms, networks and analytics systems.
Cloud outages happen, and if your firm is utilizing a legacy private cloud solution, you are more likely no stranger to downtime. The issue with these nightmare situations is not cloud computing; instead, it is the type of cloud environment, level of quality, service and reliability that your IT partner furnishing the cloud solution can offer.
Fortunately, there is an alternative, more reliable cloud solution with fewer outages for firms – the public cloud.
2. Insufficient Authority Over Critical Data and Systems
Are you tired of your data and systems being gated behind a service provider? In the public cloud, organizations have direct access to their data and storage at all times. Businesses no longer need service providers to lock away their files, making it easier for users to view and update their workloads automatically.
3. Security Failures
With cybersecurity threats and data breaches rising in sophistication, the last thing a business needs to experience is a security failure and expose their firm to higher risk. Many firms assume their private cloud providers have the latest patches, advanced technologies and robust features. However, that may not be the case, and thus creates a false sense of security for its clients.
However, public cloud providers, like Microsoft Azure, offer layers of cybersecurity to protect and secure data. Working with a cloud service provider that partners with such cloud giants can also provide businesses with managed threat protection, cyber awareness training, 24x7x365 monitoring, cybersecurity controls and more.
By migrating to the public cloud, companies also have access to features such as encryption, expertise and compliance services to help navigate the latest regulatory requirements with regards to cybersecurity.
4. Slow-Paced Collaboration and Limited Functionality
A challenge with private cloud infrastructures is that they offer limited services for new features and applications. This is because adding new features would be extremely time-consuming to build in the private cloud.
On top of that, private cloud providers have poured significant investments into their infrastructures, draining their budget bandwidth for embracing enhancements and emerging applications. These barriers to innovation coupled with slow file sharing capabilities and limitations for laptop users, create significant collaboration challenges and hinder productivity for customers.
In the public cloud, the situation could not be more opposite. Businesses benefit from passive innovation wherein feature enhancements and improvements are continually addressing the evolving needs of users, helping reduce administrative tasks and allowing teams to collaborate with ease.
Users can benefit from these public cloud innovations the moment they become live in the environment. In legacy private cloud environments, new applications and features require more time due to research, development, testing and eventual roll-out.
5. Inflated IT Costs
Is your budget for private cloud services becoming unmanageable? Businesses that employ private cloud providers pay a lump sum of infrastructure fees upfront; however, the costs for power, labor, administration and management are ongoing and significant.
Public cloud providers offer predictable and flexible IT costs, allowing customers to only pay for the resources they consume, as they consume them. The pay-as-you-go model enables companies to quickly scale up or down on resources as needed and better manage their IT budgets.
Conclusion
If you believe your company is stuck in a legacy cloud solution and are looking to gain more authority over your data and systems, bolster security controls and drive down costs, then finding the right public cloud provider is your next step. A trusted IT partner would help your business grow and scale seamlessly.
Are you on a legacy cloud solution?
Alternatively, are you grappling with the decision to switch IT partners? If so, Align is a Microsoft Tier 1 Cloud Solutions Provider (CSP) and Gold Partner. We have extensive experience delivering Public Cloud Services and comprehensive Managed IT Services to customers.Speak with one of our cloud experts to discuss the best solution for your business.
