Businesses are steadily migrating more of their information technology (IT) environment to the cloud. The cloud computing market continues to grow at an impressive rate and it’s expected to be over $940 million by 2026. The percentage of corporate data stored in the cloud continues to grow, reaching approximately 60% in 2022.

Almost every organization today seems to have embraced cloud computing. This has been occasioned by the advancements that have been made in this area. While the cloud has shown tremendous opportunities, there are various benefits and risks of cloud migration, that you need to consider. Here are the risks and benefits:

As COVID-19 continues changing norms across industries, the impact is emerging in the IT industry. Many companies are moving their IT services are moving to the cloud as a way of enhancing service provision. Although companies were already shifting their operations from onsite to the cloud pre-Covid-19, the shift has been accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic as well as lockdown and social distancing measures put in place to limit infections. This change is suddenly being felt as many players are now laying off their staff. For instance, IBM, under its new chief executive officer, is cutting off several jobs as a result of these changes. Although the number of staff that will be laid off is still not known, the Wall Street Journal reports that it is likely to be in thousands out of its original number of 352,600 as of the end of 2019.

Many benefits can be obtained when companies take advantage of cloud computing. Among the most attractive are the scalability and cost-effectiveness available by engaging public cloud providers. The flexibility afforded by using cloud resources enables an enterprise to pay for what they need and easily add or remove capacity as required. Another reason for using the cloud is to leverage services or capabilities that cannot be replicated on-premises due to a lack of technical or physical resources.