Benefits of Transitioning to Cloud Computing

A transition to Cloud would provide the University with the following direct and indirect benefits.

Direct Benefits Cloud Capabilities Features :

• High Availability –
  Infrastructure will be highly available in the Cloud with fewer outages experienced and less downtime. Applications will exist across a number of disparate Cloud Data Centres and can auto recover or terminate and restart if performance drops enabling continued quality of services.
• Flexibility –
  The University will have access to the full range of programming models, operating systems, databases and architecture with which they are familiar as well as new services available through the market place. The University will not be locked into infrastructure purchases and will have more freedom of choice.
• Self Service Self Provisioning –
  A Cloud environment will allow for greater adoption of self-service and provisioning, particularly in the research space. Graphical user interfaces and Cloud tools can be set-up to allow users to run their own workloads and have visibility of the costs and metrics associated.
• Automation and Ease of Management –
  Platform and application automation will enable greater ease of management across patching, security, provisioning, testing, deployment and logging. These operational areas become integrated into the service that the University consumes allowing quicker deployment of services.
• Scalability –
  Movement of workloads to Cloud will allow the University to instantly scale up or down in line with student and researcher demands. This will allow the University to maintain quality services as it grows and accounts for volatile or seasonal application usage (e.g. peak enrolment periods).
• Greater Security Controls –
  Cloud environments keep track of all changes made through logging and can make use of the latest firewalls and security features to reduce the likelihood and impact of cyber attacks and internal mistakes.

Indirect Benefits Cloud Consumption Enables :

• Greater Agility and Time to Market –
  Ease of development and provisioning in the Cloud will enable the University to quickly spin up new ideas and test them. This way of operation lends itself to greater agility through learning fast and taking ideas to market or further iterating upon them.
• Reduced Environmental Impact –
  The University will not need to disrupt its natural environment to build a new Data Centre and will contribute to lower greenhouse gas emissions through use of more efficient facilities.
• public Cloud providers –
  Cost Avoidance and Cost Savings Through not building a Data Centre, the University will achieve upfront cost avoidance. Whilst this will be partially offset by the need to increase investment in Cloud migration, it will drive a reduction in costs longterm through a reduction in IT overheads.
• Focus on Value-Adding Activities –
  The University can free up its resources to focus on more growth and transformation activities. This will give staff more time to uplift the environment, develop new service offerings and improve the student and researcher experience rather than keeping the lights on.
• Improved Brand Perception –
  The movement to a full Cloud environment will enhance the University’s brand and reputation as a forward-thinking University. In addition, the Cloud Platform can become a selling point to attract technology students and researchers to collaborate.
• Creation of New Revenue Streams –
  The University can capture additional revenue streams by providing researchers with Cloud services through a portal that is managed by IT. As a result, researchers will no longer need to procure their own hardware to run research workloads and the University will be able to capture this expenditure.

References –
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
https://aws.amazon.com/what-is-cloud-computing/  
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/overview/what-is-cloud-computing/  
https://cloud.google.com/what-is-cloud-computing/