Scalability is a primary driver for migrating to the cloud. But what does it really mean for your business?

Search the term “scale your business” in Google and you’ll come up with almost two billion results.

The most surprising thing about that number is that it probably doesn’t surprise many of us. The topic is a popular one because no matter what size our businesses are today, most of us are planning to grow**.** We’d love nothing more than to serve more customers, solve more customer problems, and increase our profits along the way. We’d consider it a major win if our product use doubled overnight. And we all get a little starry-eyed when we hear a Cinderella success story where companies exceed their goals by 200 percent or quadruple their team in a matter of months. Scaling is, for many of us, constantly top of mind.

But what most of us aren’t thinking about when we imagine that rapid growth – those overnight successes – is the one thing most likely to sink us if we grow too fast without it: scalable technology. Doubling product use sounds amazing, but if you don’t have the technology to support it, it’s a recipe for major incidents, unhappy customers, and stressed-out teams.

In other words, fast, smart, affordable scaling takes more than a spike in customer interest, more than great products and a culture primed for growth. It also requires systems that scale – in, out, up, and down – to meet the needs of your customers and teams, as soon as those needs arise.

This is one of the top reasons 90 percent of our customers at Atlassian choose cloud. Because if you want to grow without some major-league tech hiccups along the way, cloud technology makes scaling faster, smarter, and more affordable than on-premises servers (known as on-prem) – by a long shot.

It all boils down to always having the computing power you need at your fingertips – no lengthy, expensive, manual upgrades required.

First, let’s get on the same page about what exactly we mean by scalability.

Scalability is the availability of computing power, server space, and resources to grow (or shrink) with your business needs. If your computing power needs to increase on Black Friday, for instance, you want your server capacity to scale up to meet those needs. If your computing power needs drop between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. local time, you want your servers to scale down to use fewer resources (and cost you less money) during those slower hours.

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