**Top reasons for cloud migration**

Before we dive deep into the technical implementation, let’s find out why most companies migrate to the cloud.

**Cost savings**

Migrating to the cloud helps you lower your capital and operational expenditures. When using cloud services, you don’t need to purchase costly server equipment and spend money on its maintenance, electricity, or HVAC. In addition, your system administrators and DevOps specialists don’t need to maintain or back up hardware and software, which reduces operational costs as well.

Most cloud hosting providers offer a pay-as-you-go business model, so your monthly expenses will depend on the resources you actually use.

In 2019, SherWeb compared the cost of hosting an app on-premises and in the cloud. For the same configuration, the price of hosting on-premises was $1,476.31 a month, while the cost of hosting in the cloud was just $313.90 monthly.

In 2019, TymeBank, the first digital bank in South Africa, moved 85% of their infrastructure from data centers to the AWS Cloud. Thanks to this solution, the company managed to reduce its infrastructure costs by 47%.

**Scalability and flexibility**

By migrating to the cloud, you can automatically add resources during peak loads and lower capacity when traffic is low. In contrast, when hosting on-premises, you need to buy additional equipment to meet peak loads and spend time on its installation.

Migrating data to the cloud is a good choice if you plan to expand to new markets and quickly acquire new customers. Moving to the cloud in 2008 helped Netflix withstand incremental growth in monthly streaming hours. In 2016, Netflix expanded its service to over 130 new countries. Leveraging several AWS cloud regions made global expansion smooth and successful.

**Reliability**

Unfortunately, downtime and hardware failures happen. But migrating to cloud computing can greatly shorten downtimes and reduce the risk of data loss. Most cloud hosting providers offer service-level agreements (SLAs) that guarantee up to 99.9% availability.

Providers analyze and mitigate all risks of failure related to hardware, timeouts, failover faults, and migration problems. The cloud provider is responsible for backups and quick disaster recovery, which saves time for your company on recovery operations.

**Accessibility**

With the cloud, you can access your applications anywhere and anytime, provided you have an internet connection. Hence, companies can offer more flexible work hours to their employees and support remote work.

To learn about hte process of cloud migration, visit our cloud migration guide.