What workloads are best suited for the cloud?

Not every workload benefits equally from moving to the cloud, and understanding which genuinely do (and which might be better left as-is, at least for now) avoids both under-investing in obvious wins and over-investing in migrations that don't deliver proportional value.

Strong Candidates for Cloud Migration

• Email and productivity tools, Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace are mature, well-understood cloud services with clear, immediate benefits and minimal migration complexity
• File storage and collaboration, cloud storage with proper access controls typically outperforms an on-premises file server on both accessibility and resilience
• Backup and disaster recovery, storing backups off-site in the cloud protects against site-level disasters (fire, theft, flooding) that would otherwise take out both your primary data and an on-site backup simultaneously
• Web-facing applications, customer-facing websites and applications benefit from cloud's scalability and geographic distribution
• Workloads with variable demand, applications with unpredictable or seasonal usage patterns benefit from cloud's ability to scale resources up and down rather than provisioning for peak capacity year-round
• New application development, building new systems cloud-native from the start avoids an eventual migration project entirely

Workloads Worth More Careful Consideration

• Legacy applications with specific hardware dependencies, older, highly customised systems tightly coupled to specific on-premises hardware can be genuinely difficult and costly to migrate without significant rework
• Extremely latency-sensitive local operations, certain specialised industrial or manufacturing control systems needing millisecond-level local response times may not suit cloud's inherent network latency
• Systems with unresolved data residency or regulatory constraints, worth confirming compliance requirements before migration, not after

The Migration Decision Isn't All-or-Nothing

Most businesses land somewhere in a genuinely hybrid state, certain workloads in the cloud, others remaining on-premises, at least for a transition period or indefinitely where migration doesn't offer proportional benefit. This is a legitimate, common end state, not a temporary phase every business must eventually complete in full.

How to Actually Decide, Workload by Workload

For each candidate workload, worth asking: what's the actual benefit of moving it (cost, resilience, accessibility, scalability), what's the migration complexity and cost, and are there genuine blockers (regulatory, technical, or cost-related) that make staying put the more sensible choice right now. This workload-by-workload assessment produces a far better outcome than a blanket "move everything" or "move nothing" policy.

Our Approach

We assess your specific application landscape workload by workload, recommending migration where it delivers genuine value and being equally direct when a workload is better left as-is for now, rather than pushing a full migration regardless of whether it's the right call for every individual system.