Migrating data, applications, and other such resources to the cloud has been on the top agenda for many organizations during this period with the coronavirus outbreak and lockdowns. These efforts have been prioritised up even further as businesses are forced to support a remote workforce.
Despite the growing increased need for cloud services, moving in this direction without a clear strategy is a process doomed to fail.
When embarking on your cloud migration project, you need to ensure that you have the right strategy - without a clear understanding you risk running into higher costs, security vulnerabilities, and an overall disappointment with the overall cloud outcomes.
Here are some of our 5 recommendations on how to effectively migrate to the cloud.
1. Ensure your cloud strategy aligns with your business strategy
This step is crucial as there is no one size fits all to this solution when defining your cloud strategy.
Inevitably, business strategies will vary from business to business and therefore it is important that both business leaders and enterprise architects communicate to ensure that A). The cloud strategy aligns with and actively supports the business goals i.e. with data, sales, storage,etc and B). If these goals can be executed with the cloud platforms capabilities and discuss such limitations to find a solution or other alternatives.
When you are in the process of setting a cloud strategy, it is important for both business leaders and enterprise architects to access any cloud related risks.
The main five types of risk that are typically common for any enterprise are: 1) agility risks; 2) availability risks; 3) security risks; 4) supplier risks; and 5) compliance risks.
In conjunction to this, there needs to be a balanced assessment alongside this to also define the possible potential benefits in order to weight the pros and cons in a fair manner.
This is an integral part of any cloud strategy process - and by formulating your strategy in this way you will clearly be able to see what your “exit” strategies are before you and your team commit to any cloud projects and you will most likely be in a better position to reach a balanced cloud deployment decision at the end.
One of the most frequently asked questions when beginning a cloud migration project is “How much cheaper is the cloud?”
Answering this question will totally depend on factors that include what cloud provider you use, the products within the platform that you choose to use, and the overall nature in capacity of team workloads.
It is therefore essential to not let the cost of the project dictate the project and be the main driver - as most organisations down the line will see they have gained real benefits more from innovation rather than the cost.
One aspect when introducing a new change with a company’s cloud that is often forgotten is to understand the shared responsibility and expectation between staff and business leaders.
The responsibilities of the cloud provider are defined by its features and capabilities of the cloud service being offered. The responsibility of the staff is to leverage on these capabilities of the cloud service within their organization's own processes to ensure they deliver on the desirable outcome.
In essence this means that staff need to clearly understand what they may reasonably expect from their provider and what is their “own responsibility”.
Also, as skills and experience are essential to use cloud services, organizations should facilitate training, education and in some cases if deemed essential certification of their staff too.
When you and your team have outlined your strategy, the final step is to both define and differentiate between what approach you will use for cloud adoption.
The 3 common areas to consider with cloud adoption include: 1) adoption of software as a service (SaaS) typically used for rapid access to modern standard functionality; 2) adoption of cloud infrastructure platforms (CIPS) typically used for building unique new functions; and 3) a migration of current and legacy applications.
While this is the last step, business leaders and enterprise architects both need to work together and take a holistic view with this decision to address any trade offs that are likely to arise and thus make any further adjustments between operational control and management.
The approach needs to be deployed against each application that will be adopted to the cloud to ensure cloud strategy continuity right through to the very end.
