If you’re considering moving your business to the cloud, then you’re probably looking to strengthen your focus on achieving your business goals. Your company’s poised for the next level of growth. Now it’s more important than ever before to keep your crosshairs trained in the real raison d’être of your enterprise, and to do that at the lowest cost.
The cloud frees up strategic value.
Cloud adoption is clearly on the uptrend because it offers four overarching business benefits:
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A company’s offerings reach the market faster.
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Analytics are more finely tuned and, as a result, customers remain closely engaged.
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Business processes notch up greater efficiency, enabling corporate teams to collaborate and innovate better.
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Organizations think and work at the strategy level, rather than getting mired in operations.
IBM drills these benefits down into the precise ways1 in which cloud technologies give you greater flexibility and higher efficiency at considerable cost savings and frees up strategic value for your business.
Getting cloud adoption right the first time.
But moving to the cloud can be challenging even for the pros, says Forbes contributor Joe McKendrick,2 citing a 2018 survey of 550 IT execs.
So how do you get it right the first time? By keeping three key things in mind: your data, your applications and your provider.
1. Your Data
Mature cloud service providers maintain high security regarding clients’ data, writes Forbes Technology Council contributor Zach Lanich.3 Nonetheless, data that’s sensitive, restricted or subject to national and inter-country regulatory compliance ought to be moved to the cloud after being secured through encryption, multi-factor authentication and other controls.4 Such data should be retained on-premise, recommends CloudAcademy blogger Jeremy Cook.5 So put a data backup and recovery plan in place before migration6 and implement database security measures and data governance7 so that you can leverage your data assets, activating the cloud’s true potential. It’s imperative that you stay protected against data losses, breaches, and abuse by insiders and outsiders so that you’re clear of lawsuits, reputation and equity losses, and erosion of your customer base.
2. Your Applications
Make sure your application migration strategy maps with your business goals. This, writes Accenture’s Sara Echeverry, will help you decide which applications to take to the cloud and when, how to sequence the migration, and where to apply modernization.7 It also, as Cook adds, implements modifications in design, integration points, host OS, application database and architecture.
As in the case of your data, any proprietary applications are best kept on-premise.
Another point to keep in mind, says Echeverry, are application dependencies. Before migrating an application, keep track of an application’s interfaces, and the other applications those interfaces connect to. Migrate the whole lot together. Forgetting to transfer a part of the software – even if it doesn’t belong to the main application – could result in the application either malfunctioning on the cloud or not working at all.
Once in the cloud, Cook adds, applications may manifest added latency. You may, therefore, need to reorganize and reconfigure your network and network elements to keep response times optimal.
3. Your CSPs
In recent years, cloud service providers (CSPs) have mushroomed, with the spectrum ranging from mature CSPs, to newbies, to the fly-by-night kind. So thorough due diligence of the CSPs you’re thinking of signing up with is essential, especially because, unlike with data centers, CSPs and their customers share responsibility around services. You’re in the game together.
Once you’ve verified if the provider offers the cloud model of your choice (IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS) and the type you want (public, private, or hybrid), check the CSP’s infrastructure, operations, and maintenance supply chain. Providers, too, outsource these to third parties, and aspects like security, storage, server locations, redundancy, connectivity, tooling and ability to scale are important.9,10 Test-drive the CSP before running a full migration, advises Lanich. Avoid lock-in, opting for multi-cloud arrangements,11 if necessary. Being thorough and meticulous at this stage will be time and effort well-spent.
References:
https://www.ibm.com/cloud/learn/benefits-of-cloud-computing
https://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2018/03/08/cloud-computing-delivers-best-results-when-cloudiness-is-cleared-away/#435d38e61970
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2017/05/19/the-benefits-of-moving-to-the-cloud/#3b358d504733
https://www.skyhighnetworks.com/cloud-security-blog/9-cloud-computing-security-risks-every-company-faces/
https://cloudacademy.com/blog/cloud-migration-benefits-risks/
https://insights.sei.cmu.edu/sei_blog/2018/03/12-risks-threats-vulnerabilities-in-moving-to-the-cloud.html
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2017/04/17/move-cloud-mitigate-risk
https://www.accenture.com/us-en/blogs/blogs-sara-echeverry-cloud-migration-risks
https://www.cloudwards.net/the-risks-and-benefits-of-cloud-storage/
https://insights.sei.cmu.edu/sei_blog/2018/03/12-risks-threats-vulnerabilities-in-moving-to-the-cloud.html
