In 2020, the pace of asset migration to cloud increased by a factor of 24, according to McKinsey. That same year, we asked Atlassian customers who’d made the switch from server to cloud to tell us about their experiences, via a survey from Tech Validate. 

One of our main questions: What are the biggest benefits of a move to cloud?

Over 300 customers weighed in, and ninety-seven percent said that they’d already realized at least one benefit since migration. Here were the five advantages cited most:

1. Peace of mind around maintenance

How much time, money, and mental overhead does your IT team spend on maintaining security, servers, and version upgrades? 

If you’re like most companies, the answer is a lot. In fact, routine work to keep things running takes up nearly half (44 percent) of IT’s time each week, according to one survey. As a result, 56 percent of CIOs say they can’t complete everything the business needs, and 74 percent say they’re in danger of losing their competitive edge.

Our survey results align tidily with those findings. The most cited benefit of moving to cloud is taking security, upgrades, and server maintenance off your IT team’s plate. With an on-premise setup, IT handles everything—often manually. With cloud, your vendor does the heavy lifting of maintenance, resource scaling, security updates, and bug fixes, freeing up your teams to focus on more strategic tasks like process improvements, team support, and planning. 

Not to mention that cloud often reduces support tickets by a large margin With internal support teams reporting an average of 500 support tickets each month, according to a study by Zendesk, a significant drop in tickets is yet another way cloud can free up tech teams.

The stability and security is substantially better than we achieved on premise. Being able to scale with individual user licenses is very cost-effective.

Jarrett Prosser, Lead Engineer at Rollercoaster Digital

Finally, there’s the security side to this peace of mind. Vendors like Atlassian have dedicated security teams and stringent requirements. Internal teams aren’t always so lucky, with 48 percent of developers saying they don’t have time to spend on important security issues. This means, in-house, those issues may be getting deprioritized. With the right vendor, they’re priority one.

2. Speed and accessibility

In 2018, 76 percent of leaders said speed of IT service delivery was one of the top reasons to move to cloud. In 2020, Atlassian customers wholeheartedly agreed.

Everything from equipment to seating to software access for a new employee can be handled in one Jira Software ticket. One of my team members was able to cut onboarding time in half.

Brett Lakey, People Operations Manager at Fair

Speed and accessibility is our second most cited benefit of the switch from on-prem to cloud—and there are quite a few reasons cloud is knocking this figure out of the park. Uptime guarantees, automatic performance upgrades, and automatic scaling all contribute to faster, more available, more accessible systems. Not to mention that improved productivity in the cloud means not only are systems faster, but teams are too. 

3. Employee satisfaction

When planning a move to cloud, it’s easy to focus on the tech benefits: speed, performance, maintenance. But survey says increased employee satisfaction is one of the biggest wins of a migration.

How does cloud make employees’ lives better? For IT teams, the answer may be in how much time and mental overhead the switch can save them, making their jobs both easier and more business-driven in one fell swoop. And company-wide, the better performing, faster, more innovative systems of cloud can increase productivity and reduce employee frustration.

We can move at the speed of the industry, support our customers, and deliver real business value.

Carol Johnson, IT Director at The Telegraph Media Group

And we think the clincher is this: Cloud means access to the latest innovations. Instead of waiting three or six or twelve months for the latest upgrades in server, cloud teams get new tools, bug fixes, and upgrades as soon as they’re ready. And because we’re pouring the majority of our R&D investment into cloud, many of our best features are cloud-only or better-in-cloud.

4. Performance

In 2019, network performance became the number one reason to move to cloud, according to one survey. And on our customers’ list of benefits post-move, it ranks fourth.

Why does cloud perform so well? For one, it tends to have low latency (processing a high volume of data with no delays on the user side) and high availability (systems uptime)—two essential components to high-performing tools. 

The reason cloud does this so well is that it typically stores data close to your user base (supporting low latency) and has 24/7 teams dedicated entirely to cloud (supporting high availability). So, it’s really no surprise that 97 percent of surveyed IT organizations said that reliability is better or equal in cloud.

5. Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

Improving profits and keeping costs low (and value high) is always a business priority at the highest levels of an organization. So, it makes sense that it’s top-of-mind for those migrating to cloud.

IT pros report an average savings of 20 percent when they move to cloud, and some businesses exceed that number tidily. Redfin racked up $60,000 in immediate savings after moving to cloud—and that’s before you factor in time saved by engineers. Dominos reports saving $100,000 annually. And EQ bank says their yearly overhead savings allow them to offer more competitive interest rates to prospective customers.

If you list out the often-hidden costs of on-prem, it’s not that surprising that customers ranked TCO as one of the top five benefits of cloud. After all, physical servers, load balancers, climate control, over-licensing, electric bills, real estate, asset management, scaling costs…these add up quickly. 

As survey respondent Marcus Hecht, IT Professional at ClearlyRated, put it:

Our cost analysis easily showed that we could spend less per year on cloud than server, as well as get more features/integrations and less downtime. It was an easy, no-brainer decision to make the jump.

Benefitting from cloud

Ask Atlassian customers about the advantages of cloud and these are the answers you’ll get (or at least, these are the answers we got). Ask them how fast they realized the benefits, and the news gets even better: 37 percent said it took less than a month, and within six months, that number jumped to 75 percent. Which means not only is cloud a big win—it’s also a fast win for most.

The bottom line? We’re all-in on cloud, and survey says our customers are too. The benefits have a real impact on everything from employee satisfaction to business bottom line. And for most companies, it doesn’t take long to see those advantages start to pay off.

Planning for your own move to cloud? Check out our step-by-step guides or click below to start your free cloud trial today.

Survey says these are the top five benefits of cloud