Hey there, readers! A website is no longer merely an online store. Many companies need the site to fulfill various functions such as online and offline communication with consumers, transactions, lead generation, delivery of content, account management, and integration with business systems. As business responsibilities grow, poor website infrastructure may become a constraint.
This is where website modernisation comes into play. Modernisation means upgrading the technical architecture, platform, technology stack, security and performance, and business processes associated with the website.
One of the most important dilemmas faced in this context is whether to shift the site to the cloud. Cloud services are known for their ability to provide a flexible infrastructure, full-fledged services, a fully automated process of deploying applications, and comprehensive monitoring. However, moving the website to the cloud is not necessarily a good decision for all businesses.
The right question is not whether it is possible to move the website but rather when moving it to the cloud will make business and technical sense.
What is Website Modernisation?
Modernization of a website is a process that involves enhancing the available website to make it better suited to modern requirements through better technology, structure, foundation, and functional model.
The website built years ago may still be functional, but existing infrastructure may not be sufficient. Technology may rely on an outdated content management system, old server infrastructure, manual deployments, outdated databases or technologies that are becoming too difficult to maintain.
Modernization is able to overcome these limitations without a need for the company to create a new website from nothing.
It can depend on case to case, but modernization could involve changing the application framework, changing the frontend, changing the backend services, adding APIs, transferring the databases, introducing auto deployment, improving the means of security or moving its infrastructure to a cloud platform.
The cloud can be a place for many companies to improve their work.
Why Are Businesses Moving Websites to the Cloud?
Traditional website hosting is adequate for smaller websites with stable traffic. Nevertheless, when a company's site experiences growth, it may have to deal with many limitations related to traffic, functionality, integrations, and security issues.
To illustrate this point, let’s take a look at a traditional hosting server that has a limited amount of storage, CPU, RAM, and bandwidth. In case of sudden traffic peaks, the server might be unable to cope with the increased workload.
Cloud service infrastructure overcomes this limitation by allowing businesses to provision the necessary resources based on the application’s needs. Depending on the architecture, it will be possible for workloads to scale vertically or horizontally as well as utilize a wide range of supporting services such as content delivery networks, caching, load balancing, managed databases, etc.
Thus, cloud migration can become a crucial part of website modernisation and allow businesses to eliminate the limitations associated with the current hosting environment and reduce operational risks.
When Should You Consider Moving Your Website to the Cloud?
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to the timing of cloud migration across companies. Instead, there are many technical and business indicators that suggest it may be worth considering. One of the most visible signs is erratic and fast-growing web traffic. If your site often has unexpected bursts of traffic due to product launches, campaigns, seasons, or promotions, then it can be hard to manage fixed resources. Companies can either overinvest in resources to meet potential peaks, or they can face performance challenges during unexpected surges.
Cloud solutions provide better flexibility, allowing resources to react to changing workloads. This means that there is no need to rely on keeping resources at peak capacity all the time – it is enough to maintain enough capacity to meet average requirements.
Your Website Is Experiencing Frequent Downtime
The regular fall in access is yet another good indication that the supporting infrastructure should be improved.
A site can have an outage because of busy servers, problems with infrastructure, issues with applications, databases, problems with connections, or lack of redundancy.
Just moving a one-server website to a cloud machine does not mean that all those issues are taken care of. The invention of new technologies alone is not enough; the way the site is built should also matter.
There are special features in the cloud that help ensure redundancy, check health status, enable recovery from problems, distribute workload, and deploy sites across different regions. If a good architecture is in place, the company will be able to establish the service successfully.
The goal is not just to put the website somewhere else but to create a system where infrastructure glitches do not cause too many troubles.
Website Performance Is Becoming a Business Problem
If the speed of a website is slow, it may lead to a poor user experience or even affect the business. When people visit a website, they want the website to respond to them promptly. This is especially true when they are shopping online, filling out applications, or logging into an account. Performance issues may become more apparent when there is a lot of traffic on the website or various functionalities.
Website modernisation can be a way to solve performance issues.
Cloud-based architecture can allow the integration of caching, content delivery, scalable compute power, optimized storage, load balancing, and database optimizations.
Nevertheless, companies should make sure that they identify performance bottlenecks first. If a non-optimized solution is simply moved to the cloud, the problem remains unsolved; therefore, everything has to be optimized, from the coding processes to the whole structure of the application.
Your Existing Hosting Costs Are Difficult to Control
While it is true that conventional hosting methods can give predictable infrastructure costs, they may also require paying for resources that would remain unused at times. One organization may own a server that can process peak loads throughout the year, while in reality, this capacity is required just occasionally.
In contrast, cloud infrastructure relies on much more flexible consumption models, as companies can choose various computing, storage, database, and networking solutions according to their workloads.
Still, this does not imply that cloud computing will always be less expensive.
Inefficient cloud environments can run up costs via unused resource expenditure, excessive storage, unwanted transfer of data, an inefficient architecture, or an always-on solution that does not fulfill its purpose.
Thus, the business rationale for the cloud migration should not be based only on the hosting invoice versus cloud bill comparison, but rather on the total cost of ownership.
Your Website Has Become Difficult to Maintain
One of the factors which also has to be kept in mind when thinking about modernization is the technology debt.
The website that has been developed over time and received numerous patches and functionalities may eventually turn out to be difficult to understand and support.
The developers may avoid changing a particular component due to uncertainty about whether such a change would affect some other part of the application.
Legacy dependencies could be sources of security problems and issues of compatibility.
If the earlier development team is no longer present, the documentation is inadequate or the technology stack used in application development is not common, keeping the application up to date may become very expensive.
However, the migration to the cloud can be used to solve these technical problems and modernize the infrastructure.
Nevertheless, organizations should not treat cloud migration as a substitute for application modernization. A legacy application can remain a legacy application even after moving to the cloud.
You Need Faster Development and Deployment
Companies today have to deliver updates faster than the traditional means of development allow them to.
In cases where every change necessitates manual server setup, rigorous testing, and deployments requiring proper coordination, development teams don’t publish updates very often.
Upgrading websites can help implement DevOps principles and automated CI/CD processes that will allow more precise testing and deployment.
Infrastructure as code can also make systems repeatable.
Instead of manually performing all adjustments at the server level, developers can define what the infrastructure they need looks like, using version controlled configuration.
All of this helps standardize the development process and eliminates the risks related to differences in the configurations across different environments.
Your Website Requires Better Security
The transition to cloud systems may also be prompted by requirements for security.
Current threats facing websites are credential attacks, app vulnerabilities, harmful traffic, automated abuse, data leakage, and DoS attacks.
Cloud service providers help improve security by offering advanced security features enabling businesses to implement more advanced security systems, including identity and access management, network controls, encryption, centralized logging and monitoring, web application firewalls, and a variety of security services.
However, it is important to note that migration to the cloud doesn’t guarantee the protection of websites from possible threats.
Businesses are still required to implement secure application development techniques, vulnerability management, access control, patch management, encryption, monitoring, and regular security audits.
Thus, when modernizing their systems, companies should take into consideration both application security and cloud security instead of simply thinking that the cloud provider is responsible for everything.
Successful Cloud Migration Indicators
It is essential to assess cloud migration success through different business outcomes and technical results.
Any business can measure website performance by checking its uptime, loading speed, infrastructure use, frequency of new deployments, number of outages, REO, security incidents, and infrastructure expenses.
In terms of an e-commerce store, conversion rate, number of abandonments during the checkout process, and transaction reliability are the critical metrics.
Here, the goal is not only to become a “cloud” business, but to create web infrastructure that will better facilitate the company’s growth.
Conclusion
When an existing website suffers from old technology, scalability limits, unsatisfactory performance, operational complexities, and increased security demands, then both modernising a website and moving it to the cloud are advisable.
Moving to the cloud creates opportunities for greater flexibility, the use of services, automation, monitoring, redundancy, and scalability due to its architecture. However, moving to the cloud should not be perceived as the way to solve all possible website problems.
The most effective method is to start with an analysis of the current application, define business needs, and choose an architecture that will fit those needs.
Some companies may decide that moving to the cloud is their solution, while other companies may gain greater benefits from gradual modernisation that combines cloud migration and application refactoring.