More and more business applications, including advanced analytics, are moving into the cloud. The advantages are obvious: agility, innovation and cost-efficient high performance. However, many cloud migrations fail to unlock its full potential. To maximize the performance and value of analytics in the cloud, companies need to balance options and find the right approach.

Cost savings remain an important argument for moving to the cloud. Companies that choose to do so can save up to a third of the cost of running their data centre and infrastructure. Services such as computing capacity and storage can be used on a pay-per-use basis. Therefore, companies only pay for actual performance. And this is not trivial since an AI project can easily use 2,000 CPUs. Storage space in the public cloud usually costs only one-tenth as much as storage systems that are kept in the company.

Off to the cloud! But how?

There are broadly three ways to bring applications to the cloud: rehosting, replatforming or repurchasing. Each brings different costs, requirements and benefits. Rehosting shifts the application unchanged into a public cloud like Amazon Web Services (AWS). This creates cost savings and basic scalability, and data centre capacity is freed up for other purposes. The good thing about it is that applications and user interfaces remain the same. The disadvantage is that the applications do not bring the full agility, scalability and innovation.

Replatforming is the process of adapting the architecture so that the application achieves the best performance in the cloud and unlocks all the benefits of this approach. New applications can be integrated quickly and existing ones can be modified without major effort. One advantage is that this approach can be implemented successively.

Repurchasing means that applications are completely redeveloped or rewritten to run in a cloud environment. This can be very time-consuming and turn into a very extensive project. Therefore, you should take a close look at the cost and time involved to see whether it is worth it.

What's the case?

The cloud is becoming increasingly mainstream as companies develop the confidence to move business-critical applications to it. Security concerns, in particular, can be eliminated because while traditional perimeter security technology is often inadequate, security protocols in the cloud can be directly linked to individual assets. Some types of cyberattacks can also be better fended off in the cloud. So applications may even be better protected in the cloud than on-premises. In addition, it is becoming technologically easier and easier to migrate to the cloud. Progress in smart metering, microservices or cloud management and container technology plays a role here.

Containers as the next stage of virtualization

Containers are the next step in the development of virtual computing. Each container is equipped with a minimal operating system that is just enough to run the application on it. The container can be scaled to the extent for CPUs, memory and in-memory processing as the underlying hosting machine allows. Enterprise container platforms enable faster deployment and more flexible use of the underlying hardware infrastructure than virtual machines can.

More than HR

Established business applications such as finance, HR, supply chain or marketing are already operated in the cloud. Now is the time to take advantage of the cloud's benefits for more specific and competitive applications such as advanced analytics. In the cloud, intelligent applications can be created using artificial intelligence and machine learning without having to provision the technological environment. With a robust architecture and controlled migration to the cloud, organizations can take their analytics capabilities and performance to a new level.

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