Explained: Top 4 myths every CIO should be aware of in their journey to the cloud

New Delhi, May 5 An increasing number of CIOs now recognise the importance of the cloud and the benefits that cloud migration can bring to their organisations.

Despite this, several common misconceptions exist in the minds of customers -- often driven by a lack of understanding.

To dispel such myths and help enterprise leaders make better decisions, AWS collaborated with IDC to generate a report titled "Top 4 Myths Every CIO Should Be Aware of in Their Journey to the Cloud."

As a first step in the project, the AWS team collated the misconceptions their enterprise sales teams most frequently encountered.

These were grouped into four categories. AWS offered counter-arguments for each myth, backed by relevant case studies.

The IDC team working conducted independent research and put together the data, trends, drivers, and challenges. The final report integrates data-driven arguments and the AWS experience -- aimed at creating awareness among customers and empowering them to choose the best path in their journey to the cloud.

Busting the Myths

AWS Director and Head Enterprise, India Vaishali Kasture, who first conceptualised the report, notes that despite the many benefits of cloud migration, organisations and CIOs remain apprehensive due to misconceptions.

"Migrating to the cloud has time and again been proven beneficial, no matter the size of the enterprise. For example, our customer Bajaj Finserv Direct Limited created a digital marketplace on AWS and achieved 25 per cent disbursement growth, 30 per cent Q-o-Q customer growth, and managed to launch 11 new products in a single year. It even reduced the loan approval time for customers, from 3 days to 3 minutes. Another customer, Wynk, launched its content delivery platform on AWS and reduced development time for new customer services from 2 weeks to 4 days, and it can accommodate changing traffic in under 50 milliseconds."

Myth 1: The cloud is best suited/easier for startups and not for large enterprises.

Reality: The cloud is the backbone of all digital transformation initiatives and will receive a large portion of IT investments from large enterprises, growing at a CAGR of 23.1 per cent to reach $7,355.9 million by 2025.

Myth 2: The cloud brings challenges associated with security, ROI realization, people readiness, and downtime.

Reality: The cloud is becoming pivotal in the digital-first world, for value-based outcomes. With the right preparation and training, organisations can easily overcome the challenges of migrating to the cloud.

Myth 3: Running new-age services on cloud can get complex.

Reality: Cloud is the preferred platform for harnessing the potential of new-age services and AI workloads. Businesses can benefit from analytics on the cloud by using data to drive real-time business decisions.

Myth 4: Critical workloads should not reside on the cloud.

Reality: Enterprises are taking a "cloud first" approach to new application workloads, including business-critical workloads. Running Windows, SAP, and VMWare on the cloud offers numerous benefits. Running Windows on AWS, for example, lowers 5-year cost of operations by 56 per cent and unplanned downtime by 98 per cent, offering a 442 per cent 5-year ROI. Similarly, IDC finds that 85.4 per cent AWS customers report a significant or modest cost improvement by moving to AWS for their SAP landscapes. "VMware Cloud on AWS customers are also realising significant value, with a 5-year ROI of 479 per cent.

The Benefits of Migrating to the Cloud

The IDC report finds that AWS customers cite several benefits of using AWS offerings, including better business and operations value compared to industry standards.

With AWS as their cloud service provider, companies have derived consistent ROI. For example, by choosing AWS to build its IT and cybersecurity posture, Bajaj Allianz General Insurance Co. (BAGIC) fortified its data security, identifying security issues quickly and effectively. It used Centralised Service Control Policies, encrypting the data at rest and deploying a third-party vulnerability scanning tool.

Popular OTT service Hotstar turned to AWS to scale and manage 25+ live events concurrently -- sending event feeds to multiple playout stations, scaling resources based on real-time viewership, and distributing individual feeds for localisation and targeted ad insertion. Using the AI/ML automation pipeline platform on AWS, famous watch brand Titan migrated 2 models as a pilot.

It also built a future-ready reusable library of components for 50+ models and reduced the time taken to perform complex model execution tasks to a few minutes.

According to VG Sundar, AWS Director - Migrations, "Based on our experience, we have created an eight-pronged framework to help businesses meet the growing demand for change, while also dispelling common myths about cloud migration."

"With our cloud-led approach, enterprises can accelerate their digital journey and achieve faster and measurable transformation like what Axis Bank achieved, where we helped reduce account opening process time to less than 6 min."