The reasons can vary quite a bit from company to company. The motivation to move to the Cloud can be driven by lots of different priorities. Here are some common reasons I hear from customers:

• Reduce Cost - Yes, this is possible if you do it right. Some people argue that the cloud is more expensive. I say hogwash. It is if you don’t have a strategy and plan to leverage cloud resources appropriately. If you just lift and shift your infrastructure over to the Cloud, yes, it’s going to be painfully expensive. If you spend time doing things right, planning out how to properly leverage cloud resources with the proper controls in place, you can save money. Some companies also want to shift away from CapEx spending and go to OpEx for their IT spend.
• Improve Reliability - Unless you have near unlimited budget, you will be hard pressed to create a cost effective resilient infrastructure on your own. Companies who want to improve their reliability and disaster recovery options often look to the Cloud for those answers. AWS and Azure both offer incredible multi-region, multi-zone infrastructure that can be used to accomplish reliability goals.
• Improve Performance - The ability to scale at will and at the right times is a big benefit. Say you need to scale operations for retail eCommerce around the holidays. Before the Cloud you would have to purchase and provision infrastructure capable of meeting that type of demand/capacity (typically CapEx sunk cost) to meet that need, and then have dormant capacity for the rest of the year.
• Improve Security - As AWS famously puts it, they are responsible for security of the cloud and you are responsible for security IN the cloud. This is another point that to employ the type of security measures (physical and digital) to protect the core Cloud infrastructure would cost an arm and a leg for a single company to take on. Cloud providers have this in place so you don’t have to worry about it. Cloud consumers are responsible for what they do IN the cloud and have more control and options to do so. For just one example, it’s now possible to address key data privacy concerns by leveraging other regions of the cloud that will help you comply with data ownership regulations.
• Improve Overall Efficiency - The ability to deploy and consume cloud resources quickly gives companies great flexibility to try new things with almost no lead time. Automation is key here. The ability to script out your infrastructure (Infrastructure as Code) and deploy it within minutes, to different regions, is pretty incredible when you think about it. Not to mention the benefit of versioning your infrastructure changes over time. There are tons of other advantages in the efficiency category. Automating changes, monitoring/reporting, continual improvement, etc.

These are points I hear from all types of customers exploring their own move to the cloud. It’s not an exhaustive list, but meant to provide some of the most common reasons why a company would move to the cloud. I hope this is helpful to you!