Top 5 Benefits of Migrating to the Cloud

Everyone’s instinctive reaction is that there must be benefits to migrating to the cloud. And of course, there must be at least 500 of those benefits—so listing just five in this post should be easy!

But this is what you might call received wisdom—forged on the golf courses frequented by CIOs, CEOs, and company boards. (You can tell there is a hint of jealousy in that statement, as I don’t get the time to play golf!). What I’d like to suggest is that received wisdom needs to be tempered in the furnace of operational IT reality—where it’s battle-tested against the pressures of cost management, security concerns, compliance requirements, and the day-to-day challenge of simply keeping the lights on.

So, before we get to the top five benefits, let’s get real: there may be no benefits at all if the cloud migration isn’t done right in the first place (see my other blog post: “How to succeed with your cloud migration strategy [or not]”). I’ll assume you’ve read that post first and are thus open to looking at your cloud migration strategy from outside the traditional box. To achieve real benefits from migrating to the cloud, you’ll need to evaluate your strategy before you start your cloud journey. And I’d venture that part of this evaluation needs to involve looking at the value that companies like Nutanix and Rubrik bring to the table—pioneering new architectures that have redefined traditional IT approaches and made the hybrid cloud dream a reality.

To give a bit of context on the technology:

I have said for years that Nutanix was “born in the cloud and bred for the datacentre” (Nutanix marketing never adopted my clever slogan, but feel free to ask ChatGPT to see whether this is accurate!). Nutanix software can be deployed on traditional on-premise servers or directly in public clouds—including natively in AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, OVH Cloud and more. Nutanix uniquely gives you a true distributed hybrid cloud with a single point of management and as such is unlike any competing “hybrid” cloud tech out there.

Rubrik, on the other hand, was built from the ground up to be the world’s most innovative software platform for modern enterprises looking to simplify backup and data management, deliver instant recovery, accelerate cloud adoption, and defend against ransomware. It’s vendor- and cloud-agnostic, supporting all major enterprise applications, operating systems, databases, hypervisors, clouds, and SaaS platforms. Rubrik indexes all metadata to deliver a unified system of record—stored on an immutable file system.

We’ve deployed these technologies for our customers around the world to support their cloud strategy and here are five key benefits they’ve achieved as a result:

1. Avoid cloud lock-in
With Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) running in Azure or AWS, you can seamlessly move your applications between on-premises Nutanix clusters and public clouds, all through a single management console. You’re using the same Nutanix software and licences across your on-prem and cloud clusters—optimising your IT investment and avoiding vendor lock-in. This hybrid approach gives you flexibility and protects you from sudden pricing changes or shifts in your chosen cloud provider’s operating model. Similarly with Rubrik, you can protect your on-premise data in the cloud and provide the ability to recover into different environments, improving your ability to escape the orbit of a cloud provider that doesn’t deliver the service you need or want.

2. Leverage existing accounts and landing zones
Both NC2 and Rubrik Cloud Clusters operate within existing networking constructs and services on Azure or AWS, so you can use your existing accounts and networking setup (VPNs, VNets and Subnets). That means there’s no need to manage complex network overlays—dramatically reducing the operational complexity of deploying and managing a hybrid cloud, especially when extending, bursting, or migrating apps and workloads.

3. Build resilience across clouds
With NC2, you have the ability to failover workloads seamlessly between on-premises and the public cloud—or even between different cloud providers. Rubrik enhances this by letting you back up VMs, databases, files, and Kubernetes clusters in one cloud and restore them to another— Rubrik handles format conversion, compatibility, and orchestration to ensure the restore process works smoothly, thus supporting true multi-cloud resilience.

4. Effortless scale and flexibility
Automatic scaling—up or down—with just-in-time provisioning (across Nutanix or Rubrik clusters) keeps cloud costs in check. You can match infrastructure capacity to your needs, rather than over-provisioning and overspending.

5. Eliminate cloud micro-wastage
With traditional cloud IaaS, you’re often stuck with “T-shirt” sized VM instances—either too big or too small. With Nutanix NC2, you can fine-tune VM resources to your exact requirements—eliminating micro-wastage. In fact, we’ve seen customers achieve up to a 50% cost reduction compared to native Azure or AWS IaaS. With Rubrik BaaS or DRaaS services from ET Works, you pay on a pure consumption model for only the TB’s of data you protect.

Final word:

Cloud migration can deliver serious value—but only if it’s done right. Get the strategy, the tools and the platforms right, and the benefits aren’t just theoretical—they’re measurable.

If you’d like to learn more, have an open discussion or a free consultation, contact me today.