Being able to rapidly scale up, down, out and in, allows a company to react to peak loads on IT systems caused by, amongst others, holidays, marketing campaigns and unforeseen events. Missing holiday season sales because of overloaded IT systems or being overwhelmed by traffic due to a very successful marketing campaign can be costly both in financial sense and in NPS. The most popular way of enabling rapid scaling is migrating to a public cloud like Amazon’s AWS, Google’s GCP or Microsoft Azure. Older software can be difficult or impossible to move to a cloud environment because of very specific platform requirements, restricting scaling ability.
