Motivation for going cloud

At Zmags we recently completed a move from a traditional hosting provider to a cloud hosting provider. The move was a pure business decision and was founded on quite elaborate analysis and considerations.

The evaluation process and an upcoming speaking engagement at Cap Gemini got me thinking about motivations for moving into the cloud. As it turned out, the factors that motivated us could be split into two buckets. One bucket containing defensive and one containing offensive business advantages. Somewhat like the hygiene factors of the two factor theory, the defensive business advantages are the features that have to be present in any hosting offering to keep customers on-board.

These factors include

· Stability / Availability

· Maintainability

· Security

· Reasonable cost

Although it isn’t always the case, the defensive factors should be present at any serious hosting provider and they need to be as they are the factors that will keep your environment coasting along without too much hassle. They are to the SaaS provider what a hammer is to a carpenter; a good stable tool that you can count on to bring bread to the table. Obviously, the basic tools of the carpenter aren’t decisive factors in building a million dollar housing enterprise, they need to be there but to really offer clients value for money (and thus grow the business) the offensive factors are needed. They are the factors that give you distinct competitive advantages. In SaaS it is often a distinct competitive advantage to be able to churn out more features faster but that also means being able to serve the influx of new customers that these new features rake in.

For us the decisive offensive factors where the ability to scale extremely fast and to be able to have an abstraction from the raw iron underneath our application. Cloud hosting provides us with the ability to continuously adjust our computing capacity to the needs of our customers which is a huge advantage to us because it saves us money and to our customers because it allows them to complete their work even faster. In addition we no longer have to worry about running specific applications on “one of the beefy servers”, we run it on the appropriate instance and if it isn’t available it can be started within a few minutes.

The next big advantage for us will come as we migrate our build farm and our test and staging environment to the cloud. By doing so we can achieve faster build process, better and more accurate testing and thus higher development velocity.

These factors mean that our hosting facility is completely aligned with the business and is able to expand at the increasing pace of the company.

We have barely scratched the surface of the potential of cloud computing and the offensive factors but we have already achieved huge (and recognized) advantages for our clients. In the future awaits substantial improvements and a more fun development cycle were we will be able to churn out features even faster and keep up with the pace of our customers.