You haven’t moved to the cloud yet? In this Azure Every Day installment, I’d like to tell you the top 5 reasons why you may want to move your infrastructure to the cloud.

1. Cost – Many people can take advantage of operational cost savings by not having to invest in a bunch of hardware that sits unused. In the cloud, you only pay for what you use.

2.  Business Continuity – With the cloud, you have better, more guaranteed up-time without having to worry about in-house appliances or certain infrastructures or servers. You also get easier administration. The cloud locations in Azure are set up so you can easily maintain and migrate your systems. And there’s no need for a second data center, giving you high availability, as well as more cost savings.

3.  Agility – You don’t have to spend money having something running all the time. It’s easy to spin up and spin down as you need it. You also have the ability to scale at an exponential rate. You can start small, but quickly build in traffic or performance capabilities or whatever you need.

4.  Management and Maintenance – You can drastically reduce the time needed to maintain and manage your environment, as well as have one central area for monitoring and maintaining your systems. You’ll save time wasted on running back ups and maintaining servers.

5.  Improved Security – Cloud providers have it in their best interest to be secure. There are over 300,000 open security jobs in the US alone. Where do you think those people want to work when there’s top quality companies paying top dollar? You guessed it – cloud companies.