1. Low barriers to entry – This reason is as close to the cost as one can get, but, in most cases, is applicable to mostly startup firms that have little to no funding. Large cloud providers often lure such companies with thousands of dollars in credits and/or even free server instances, that come with very limited computing resources. However, once they begin to grow, these firms soon exhaust all their credits and/or outgrow the free server instances, and find their costs begin to exponentially increase. Nevertheless, this remains a very strong driver for early Cloud adoption
2. Scalability – A large cloud provider provides a business the ability to scale very rapidly by adding infrastructure through simple clicks, a task that may take quite some time and planning, if the business were to own its own hardware. Therefore, if you are expecting your business to grow substantially leading to higher demand in computing resources, you should definitely consider going with a large cloud provider.
3. Global presence – A large cloud provider has data centers in different parts of the world, which allows them to offer computing resources in geographical proximity to the clients of businesses to minimize latency effects, a feat which may be considerably difficult to achieve especially for a small or mid-sized firm with limited resources. Today, your hi-tech business may have clients only in the North America, but a large cloud provider, can allow you to quickly move into Europe or Asia without having to spend considerable resources in setting up your own infrastructure in those parts of the world.
4. Elasticity – With your own infrastructure, the only way to deal with fluctuating demand in the short-term is to invest in adequate infrastructure that can allow you to deal with demand at peak times, which will then leave you with excess capacity during non-peak times. Seasonality for retailers results in very high demand during certain months of the year, however, many businesses experience demand fluctuations on a weekly and even on a daily basis. A large cloud’s “pay-for-what-you-use” policy allowing you add and subtract from computing resources can be very valuable tool to match your computational capabilities with the demand curve.
5. Redundancy – While implementing business continuity using backup, mirroring, and fail-over for HA (high availability) can all be implemented for companies owning their own infrastructure, large cloud providers make it easier to make all this happen, especially for a business whose mission critical system may have to rely on not just one but multiple redundancies. However, unless a business needs multiple redundancies for its mission critical system(s), we consider this to be the weakest reason to migrate to a large cloud provider.