By Kirk Drake | October 8, 2012

Top Five Reasons Credit Unions Move to the Cloud

Many of our clients and Credit Unions ask us about why they should move to the cloud. In general we have found that are five primary reasons people move to the cloud. If you are considering moving your business to the cloud, this post will help provide some general trends about why most are moving.

#1 Reason

50% – To provide on-demand resources

Cloud offers huge capabilities in scalability. The general nature of the business requires your provider to maintain excess capacity and build a platform that is highly scalable. However, if you are thinking of a private cloud, it probably won’t offer the true scalable nature of either community or public clouds.

#2 Reason

43% – To gain access to more robust DR and backup services

There are many great advantages of using the cloud for DR, Disaster Recovery. The most significant include the ability to have the on-demand resources but only pay for a small portion day to day. In addition, using the cloud to backup your systems offsite securely enables you to avoid many of the deployment expenses and capital expenses related to something you will hopefully never use.

#3 Reason

38% – To replace existing infrastructure

As your technology infrastructure gets older, replacing it with cloud components will enable you to maximize existing infrastructure. In addition, it enables you to avoid the project management and deployment expenses associated with setting up and migrating to a new infrastructure. Often times with cloud, you can simply turn on what you need quicker, faster, and cheaper than you can provision it on your own. Data Center infrastructure is a great example. When you can rent co-location space on a monthly per rack basis, it never makes sense to build your own data center anymore.

#4 Reason

32% – To extend and utilize current infrastructure

Like #3 – this reason involves a baby step approach to the cloud. Take one application or service at a time, freeing up resources from your existing infrastructure and thus extending its life. For example, if a server has two applications today and it is near the end of its life – moving one application to the cloud may extend the life of the other another year or two, saving you big money.

#5 Reason

30% – To increase utilization of a virtualized environment

Using your cloud provider’s virtualized infrastructure and tools can greatly speed up the process for moving away from physical servers. Most likely, your cloud provider will already have clusters, load balancing and provisioning portals as part of the infrastructure. This will greatly enable you to move to the latest and greatest virtualized platforms skipping the steps of physically building your own platform.

In conclusion, there are many great reasons to move to the cloud. In reality though, moving to the cloud will be an incremental process that involves first building the paths to get there and then moving components as necessary.

Do you have questions about building a strategy to get to the cloud? Are you concerned about what type of cloud your company or Credit Union should be using? If so, please e-mail us at info@ongoingoperations.com or fill out our contact us form.