With 75% of databases expected to be on a cloud platform by the end of 2022, the topic of on-prem vs. cloud is more relevant now than ever.
The advantages of cloud computing are many — namely, reduced costs, improved security, increased business agility, stronger backup and disaster recovery, and freed up time.
In this article, we’ll dive into each of these reasons more deeply to show you why you should migrate from on-prem to the cloud. We’ll also talk about what makes Splunk Cloud the leading cloud platform choice, as well as discuss some considerations for before you make the switch.
But first, a quick overview of what exactly on-prem and cloud computing are:
What is On-Premises Computing?
On-premises, or on-prem, computing means keeping data in physical servers that your company hosts and stores. You’re responsible for purchasing, installing, maintaining, and upgrading the equipment, as well as actually inputting your data into the equipment.
What is Cloud Computing?
Cloud computing means keeping data in virtual “cloud” servers hosted by a third-party provider. The provider is responsible for the equipment and its maintenance. All you’re responsible for is uploading your data.
What is Splunk Cloud?
Splunk Cloud is a cloud-based platform that provides a complete suite of self-service capabilities for you to collect, search, monitor, report, and analyze both your real-time and historical machine data. It includes all the benefits of the award-winning Splunk Enterprise in a cloud-based format.
Now that we have the basics established, here are five reasons you should migrate from on-prem to the cloud.
5 Reasons to Migrate From On-Prem to the Cloud
1. Reduce and Optimize Costs
Storing your data on-premises comes with a hefty price tag. There’s the up-front costs of purchasing all the hardware (physical servers, software licenses, and network equipment), as well as the recurring costs of maintenance, electricity, and new servers as your business scales.
With the cloud, these costs are replaced by a simple monthly or yearly pay-as-you-go subscription fee. This means you only pay for what you actually need – no longer do you have to waste costs on excess equipment or unnecessary hardware.
Switching from capital to operational IT expenditures like this allows you to pay lower up-front costs, easily scale capacity up or down, reduce management costs, and focus more on what matters to your organization.
2. Improve Security
In the cloud, your data is stored on servers with built-in security measures like data encryption and unique logons. These servers are regularly updated to follow the latest security standards and ward against the newest forms of attacks.
One of the biggest advantages of a cloud-based platform is that you get access to the unmatched security expertise of the cloud provider. These providers pour millions of dollars into security each year, which is something most companies simply can’t match on their own.
Additionally, storing sensitive data on the cloud means there’s less of a risk of it getting into the wrong hands should an employee’s device get lost or stolen. Cloud storage also lessens the risk of insider attacks as you can choose exactly who in your organization gets access to which documents.
3. Increase Business Agility and Scalability
With cloud storage’s pay-as-you-go model, you can easily scale up or down to adjust for business growth or peak seasons. Scaling with on-premises equipment, on the other hand, is an arduous process that often takes weeks or months to complete.
Another way the cloud increases business agility is that it gives you the freedom to quickly download new apps or experiment with different data-management approaches. Being able to quickly adapt to market changes like this is essential for keeping up with today’s fast-paced competition.
4. Strengthen Backup and Disaster Recovery
When you store your data on-prem, you’re always one fire, flood, or theft away from losing it all.
Storing your data on the cloud eliminates this risk altogether, making disaster recovery a much less scary topic.
With the cloud, you also have much more robust and frequent backups. Between having these backups occur instantaneously and having multiple layers of redundancy (i.e., multiple different files of the same data stored in different places), you can be confident in the safety of your data.
5. Free Up Time to Spend on Things That Matter
With on-prem data management, your IT employees spend a good chunk of their time on backups, maintenance, troubleshooting, and software updates.
Switching to the cloud means your cloud provider handles all of this, freeing your employees to spend time on more important things like strategy and optimization.
Reasons to Migrate to Splunk Cloud
As a cloud-based platform, Splunk Cloud will bring you all of the aforementioned benefits.
Where the platform really shines, however, is in its front-end content creation capabilities.
With Splunk Cloud, you can easily stream, analyze, monitor and search any kind of data in real time to detect and prevent issues and truly make sense of your data. You can create almost any query, dashboard, report, or alert you can think of, as well as choose from over 1000 apps tailored to specific business needs.
Between these powerful content creation abilities and the platform’s unmatched security standards, we recommend Splunk Cloud to anyone looking for a cloud provider.
Important Considerations
Although the cloud does make things easier, there are still a lot of responsibilities that fall on you as a client.
First, you’ll need to be extremely careful during your migration. Data at this time can easily be lost, so the migration needs to be handled by experts.
Second, you’ll need to be prepared to maintain and administer your data collection, as cloud providers can’t help with this. Knowing how to troubleshoot log collection and set it up for scalability and reliability is essential.
Third, if you want to make the most out of a platform like Splunk, you’ll need to have a solid cloud strategy in place. Understanding what your business wants to achieve is crucial for creating the right dashboards, reports, and alerts and for coming up with the best ways to search/visualize/enrich data. Remember: it isn’t the equipment itself that’s the main value driver for an organization — it’s the front-end content creation.
All of this is why we recommend working with a third-party Spunk Services Team that can handle all of these factors that the cloud provider can’t.
Using a third-party Splunk services team like SP6 means you can rest assured that your data will be safe during the migration, that your cloud platform will be set up properly, and that you will get the most out of the platform based on your business needs.
Work With Us
To learn more about how SP6’s team of experts can help with all of your cloud needs, schedule a consultation with us today.
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SP6 is a niche technology firm advising organizations on how to best leverage the combination of big data analytics and automation across distinct (3) practice areas:
- Cybersecurity Operations and Cyber Risk Management (including automated security compliance and security maturity assessments)
- Fraud detection and prevention
- IT and DevOps Observability and Site Reliability
Each of these distinct domains is supported by SP6 team members with subject matter expertise in their respective disciplines.
