In today’s world when the IT industry is moving away from the big on-premise datacenters to cloud based datacenters and serverless architecture. There might be scenarios where you need to convince some potential client about the benefits from such migration.

If there are some companies that are planning their first on-premise to cloud movement, it is important to discuss with them the benefits of the cloud along with the associated challenges-

Below are the benefits from the migration-

• The business of the company would be on rise, this will raise the demand of additional infrastructure to accommodate the additional load, the cloud migration gives the flexibility of auto-scaling and no need to reserve the hardware in advance to meet such requirement.
• Over the time the storage requirements can grow exponentially, it would be very costly to meet such need in the on-premise data centers, the cloud vendors provide the storage on demand that is highly available, durable and reliable.
• The data-center security, physical as well as data, is another costly affair to deal with in the case of on-premise, when moving to cloud this is handled by the cloud vendor; we as the application owners are responsible for securing our resources.
• Moving to cloud will result in the saving of operational cost.
• While creating a DR plan, the target architecture can double the on-premise infrastructure cost with regional redundancy extremely expansive to achieve; the Cloud movement would provide to achieve this very effectively.
• The DevOps capabilities of the Cloud vendors will provide the flexibility the focus on development with the level of automation provided.
• It makes life of operation team becomes a lot easier due to automation, monitoring etc. capabilities provided by the cloud vendors.

Below are associated risks/challenges-

• If the business is running as expected for decades with saturation already achieved; all the SLAs are being met, everything is in control; then no need to disturb this beautiful calmness.
• There might be some legacy apps those have very strict dependency (hardware/OS) and can’t be moved to cloud.
• The app can’t be moved without re-architecting/refactoring due to some dependencies.
• There might be some compliance challenges or some sensitive data that can’t be moved outside the boundary of the premise.
• There might be some latency experienced when app is accessed over internet when compared to access from in-house LAN.