How Move to Cloud accelerates growth and reduces IT costs

Manufacturing and industrial enterprises have intensified their adoption of Move to Cloud in recent years. This approach addresses theneed to accelerate growth and improve operational flexibility, as well as reduce IT costs by transforming fixed expense items into more agile and manageable costs over time. It is now widely recognized that the move to the cloud, supported by the use of increasingly advanced AI platforms and analytics, produces significant effects in terms of scalability, innovation and cost containment.

Greater agility and innovation

Cloud platforms offer the opportunity to rapidly increase or decrease compute, storage and network resources, pandering to spikes in demand or startups of new production lines, without the need for local hardware purchases and installations. Many mid-market manufacturing companies take advantage of this on-demand elasticity to develop Proof of Concept, prototype or plant-wide AI/IoT implementations.

In parallel, the availability of continuous integration pipelines (CI/CD) is easier to deploy in a cloud environment, resulting in shorter release times and promoting a continuous innovation process. In industrial sectors, this translates into continuous improvement of systems such as ERP, MES and supply chain, as well as rapid evolution of real-time monitoring projects.

In addition to the ability to adopt DevOps methodologies, an additional benefit involves native support for advanced technologies such as analytics, AI, IoT, and large data lakes. With these capabilities, companies can initiate predictive maintenance projects and use large-volume industrial datasets without having to acquire high-performance infrastructure in-house. For example, a company interested in developing predictive maintenance algorithms can create dedicated cloud environments in a matter of weeks, achieving a high degree of scalability, testability, and security.

Operational flexibility

Choosing the cloud allows for quick response to significant fluctuations in workloads, avoiding oversizing and physical constraints typical of on-premise infrastructures. In industrial and manufacturing settings, where production demand may experience seasonal peaks or linked to certain order cycles, it is crucial to be able to increase or decrease IT capacity in a matter of days (or even hours) without generating excessive fixed costs. This elasticity also proves crucial for managing expansion to new markets or plants, where IT infrastructure can be replicated in different cloud regions, limiting investment and deployment time.

Equally important is support for hybrid and remote work, as access to cloud resources facilitates collaboration of distributed teams and ensures business continuity even in conditions of reduced logistics or local emergencies. With cloud platforms, offices and plants can effectively coordinate with external partners and research centers, quickly enabling shared environments for developing or testing new solutions.

Improving business performance

Adoption of the cloud provides an ideal basis for factory data collection and analysis by integrating information from PLCs, IoT sensors and ERP into a single repository (data lake). With KPIs updated in real time, the company can make faster decisions and immediately adjust production or supply chain.

Revenue growth opportunities also arise from the integration of AI/IoT platforms in maintenance and analytics, which can drastically reduce the risk of downtime and improve product quality, with a positive impact on the income statement. According to some estimates, companies using advanced analytics systems in the cloud to optimize production processes and supply chain experience revenue increases in the range of 10-15 percent already within the first two years of implementation.

How the Cloud Reduces IT Costs

The adoption of cloud computing represents a significant shift for many companies, offering the opportunity to drastically reduce IT costs compared to traditional on-premise models. Enterprises can leverage various service models such as IaaS, PaaS and SaaS to get the infrastructure they need without having to invest heavily in hardware and maintenance. Let’s look at the key benefits in detail.

Lower operating costs

Cloud models avoid the burden of purchasing and maintaining on-premise servers, plus the expense of power consumption, cooling, licensing and staffing. Based on various assessments, an entirely on-prem facility can be 30 to 40 percent more expensive than a corresponding cloud configuration for the same performance, with even greater differences in areas where capacity must remain high even in the face of intermittent peaks. As a result, the pay-as-you-go pricing system makes it possible to adjust IT spending to business performance and easily reduce costs at times of lower activity.

Reduction in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

The availability of services in IaaS, PaaS and SaaS modes offers a wide range of architectures, where the best configuration can be chosen for each specific workload. Manual interventions dedicated to backup, security patching and resource provisioning are greatly reduced, as many of these activities are automated at the platform level. These dynamics result in a reduction of IT staff required and time savings for those managing the systems themselves.

A well-planned migration to cloud infrastructure results in a TCO reduction of 30 to 50 percent. Some enterprises that have moved ERP to SaaS mode have achieved even higher savings percentages by optimizing licensing and infrastructure costs.

Elimination of capital costs

Shifting from a capital expenditure (Capex) model to an operating expenditure (Opex) model proves beneficial for many medium-sized companies, as it frees up financial resources to reinvest in new product lines or R&D programs. In this way, management can focus on aspects of innovation and competitiveness without worrying about hardware renewal and depreciation cycles.

This change allows IT managers to focus on long-term strategies, such as improving core processes, reducing waste, or customizing the product.

The Move to Cloud is the highway of innovation

Next-generation cloud solutions offer numerous economic and financial benefits to which are added integrated cybersecurity, monitoring and analytics services that, given the increasing complexity of the global scenario, make Move to Cloud a strategic option for containing costs while increasing dynamism and innovation capacity.

For manufacturing and industrial companies, this path represents a real opportunity to compete at a higher level in terms of efficiency, speed and prospects for revenue growth, margin improvement and stronger competitive positioning.

Find out how Move to Cloud can transform your business-contact us for an initial no-obligation consultation.