Skyrocketing Cloud Market

If, for example, a company purchased computing hardware in 2014, then it has to upgrade it not later than in 2019 and at much higher prices than five years ago. Infrastructure upgrade has become hardly affordable, which is why more and more companies opt for migrating their services to cloud. This way, they also solve infrastructure maintenance issues and optimize associated expenses (for example, on licenses). Moreover, customers do not always limit themselves to cloud services only, opting for a hybrid model: combination of on-premise, cloud, and HaaS in a commercial data center. Such an approach pays off in case of variable load services. Customer uses physical capacity, with cloud resources coming into play to cope with peak loads.

What is good about cloud? You always use a pay-as-you-go model and know beforehand the cost of computing resources to be consumed depending on possible load on business systems. For example, if expecting the number of your online store visitors to double, you can allocate necessary resources in advance to ensure uninterrupted website operation. You can also shut down unused VMs at night, thus saving up to 50% of cloud service bills. We have such a case in our track record: a medical organization is thus reducing IT costs by managing them manually.

A per-hour cloud billing system allows a product manager to develop a clear financial plan for IT projects with by-project cost breakdown. Such an approach is used by a ticket, hotel, and tour booking portal.

Customers know that cloud is a secure environment, often much more secure than any local infrastructure. Large providers, which care about their reputation, do ensure that all advanced security tools run properly, all emergency processes are documented and drilled, and cloud platform security is regularly checked. For example, CROC Cloud recertification for compliance with PCI DSS includes biannual pentests, i.e. cloud platform hacking simulations.

Let me say a few words about infrastructure certification issues. As a rule, customers, which are hosting restricted access services, obtain regulatory compliance certificates all by themselves. However, we are ready to provide a document package on the cloud platform, so that you can dramatically accelerate certification.

One of the recent trends is growing interest in cloud services on the part of foreign companies launching business in Russia. This is confirmed by iKS-Consulting research stating that Russia is becoming a cloud service exporter. Foreign customers resort to Russian clouds for two reasons. First, cloud penetration in the Western countries is higher than in Russia. That is why foreign customers often favor a cloud model of resource consumption and use it more comprehensively: they transfer services and infrastructure of their entire multinational corporation to the cloud. Second, their decision to use a cloud is influenced by the Russian legislation, in particular Federal Law on Personal Data #152-FZ. IT system localization in Russia is usually part of new office establishment or M&A activities, when a foreign company inherits services hosted on sites outside Russia. Thus, SK Operations logistics company transferred its data to the cloud so that to further aggregate it on a single platform after the acquisition of another business.

To avoid recruiting and keeping IT professionals on staff, many companies simply outsource everything related to their infrastructure support and development. This is particularly demanded by foreign companies with a head office comprising just a couple of dozen managers supervising the work of many external contractors. Outsourcing in the form of a managed service allows companies to get required expertise from the market without any incentive effort as in case of their own staff and focus on strategic tasks without wasting time on routine.