IT Modernization is a Top Cloud Driver, But What Does It Entail?

According to a recent Gartner survey, IT modernization is the top motivation to move to public cloud services for companies of all sizes. Cost savings came in a close second, but in many ways IT modernization leads directly to cost savings. Cloud providers offer the latest technology powering scalable infrastructure, and they can deploy it much more rapidly than an in-house IT team without a capital expense for the client organization.

Here are some of the reasons companies modernize their IT through cloud computing and some of the benefits they find when they do.

Why modernize IT with cloud?

It costs both time and money to maintain old systems — just ask the feds, who admitted early this year that in 2015, they spent around 75% of their IT budgets keeping legacy equipment and applications functional. That leaves only a quarter of the budget for new systems or initiatives.

Using a cloud provider means physical equipment and the virtualization platform are always maintained and up to date. With a managed cloud option, operating systems and some applications can even be kept patched and monitored for proper functionality. Ask your IT team how much time they’re spending maintaining current applications rather than helping users. That time could be freed up.

Over time your IT environments naturally being to sprawl. Mergers and acquisitions, different managers who have come and gone, and forgotten company projects all contribute to a mishmash of legacy applications and hardware that may be redundant or may not communicate with one another.

Old hardware also eventually dies, and that death is rarely painless. It takes a significant amount of staff time and capital to replace servers and reconfigure them. If they have been in service for a long time, there may no longer be vendor support for them either.

Most modernization pushes will seek to identify these applications and re-host, rearchitect, and re-platform them to enable interoperability, standardization, and/or a single hosting platform for more simplicity and ease of administration.