Decision-makers in the IT and Product areas of enterprises must consider these six factors before migrating to the cloud, including the state of their current technology park.
While there have always been many corporate-level doubts about the advantages and disadvantages of migration to the cloud, the reality is that companies take various approaches to their migration projects, and decision-making about cloud services is not an issue. a unique event, but one that will evolve every time we orient the company’s IT infrastructure to a Multi-Cloud and/or hybrid approach
Let’s take a look at the factors to decide on a cloud migration.
First, companies take various paths to the cloud. Some may exclusively use public cloud services, such as Amazon, Azure, Google, Huawei Cloud, and others. Others may choose a hybrid strategy, where they host some data in the cloud and others in their local data centers. For regulations, latency, security, or other reasons, other companies may choose to keep all data on-premises in a private cloud.
Second, shoppers should evaluate whether to buy cloud services app by app or for their entire environment.
Third, and lest we forget, technology purchasing decisions have become more complex, with more stakeholders from the line of business participating in the process.
Always the decision-makers in IT and Product who decide the migration strategy, have to take into account these 6 points, which we consider critical when making a decision based on facts and realities.
Point 1: Does cloud migration provide the technology and features you need?
The technology team must first consider what they can gain by migrating to the cloud. It is critical to validate whether the existing technology in the current application environment is compatible with current cloud technologies. Both at the application level and at the operating system level.
We have seen many situations in which applications have been years without modernizing, or are supported by old operating systems, which are not updated and do not have support from both the manufacturer and compatible equipment in the current cloud offering.
It is also important to understand how cloud applications will connect to local applications. As an example, we can consider applications that are not prepared to manage APIs or Services that connect to external networks.
Point 2: Which option positions you on the best evolutionary path?
Consider how your decision could limit your choices in the future. With any acquisition of complex technology, it is critical to have suppliers to accompany technological evolution. In these decisions, it is important to know the experience and evolution that providers have had and to evaluate for each set of applications or loads to migrate what is the provider’s experience or agility.
This, we believe, is one of the most important definitions. Since betting on the company’s future IT to a single player can be risky. Here the decision to go to a multi-cloud environment prevails where we can distribute the load in an organized way according to the experiences with each vendor and the need of each project.
Point 3: How we evolve the financial model of our IT operation
One of the strongest drivers for deciding to take a cloud strategy is the migration from CAPEX to OPEX of the IT operation. This offers us many advantages, particularly in advance investments that the traditional model implies with large CAPEX investments. Adding to this the cost of maintenance, license renewals, and additional service costs.
With the OPEX model, it allows us to distribute the real cost of what is used month by month, which makes the financial model more flexible and allows us to make the monthly cost of the operation more flexible according to the consumption and advantages of IT costs on demand. This, however, is tied to point 1, where the modernity of our applications and their compatibility with elasticity and flexibility is critical since if the applications are not prepared for this model, we will be replicating the traditional data center, with its rigidity to the cloud.
At this point, we recommend involving your company’s finance team in the decision of the cloud model to adopt to prepare the organization for effective use and cost.
Point 4: How we make sure we have the security that our company requires.
Data security is neither more nor less critical in a traditional environment or a cloud environment, although cloud providers give us one more point of tranquility when it comes to having updated environments and security by volume. We must have security considerations as much or more present than in traditional infrastructure.
The regulations of some industries and/or countries add an additional point of complexity, since certain data or processes need to be in compliance with them, and in public cloud environments, it is more complex for regulatory bodies to certify.
We have the advantage that the main suppliers already have the processes and protocols compatible with most of the industry regulations, and they work in each country where they have a presence to achieve local certifications.
We recommend the following measures to mitigate some of the important safety and regulatory points:
1. Store the most sensitive or regulated data locally, using a hybrid cloud or a private cloud as a complement to the public cloud.
2. Manage your own security and encryption keys.
3. Select a cloud service with Zones where the configurable data resides to ensure that your data is stored in a specific geographic area.
Point 5: What are the costs of the change
In any cloud adoption process, we have to keep the costs very in mind. We have different migration models, but it is important to follow these steps prior to migration:
* Clearly understand what the current infrastructure is, your growth forecast, your current resource consumption, and your current data traffic.
* Know the latency necessary to maintain the quality of services to users.
* Know the licenses necessary to operate with the migratable platforms, their business model to move them from an on-prem system to a cloud model, and understand whether or not cloud vendors include them in their cost of consumption.
* Understand if the applications are prepared for Auto-Scalability and flexible infrastructure.
* Understand the roadmap and cost of modernizing applications to get the most out of the cloud.
After the migration takes into account the following points to see the impact of the cost.
* What is the projected consumption, what operation peeks can we face and how do we estimate their costs.
* Understand the cost and consumption of a recovery environment (DRP or Fail-Over) to have a continuous operation.
* Understand the cloud backup model and process and its associated costs (Storage and Traffic)
* After a while, look for pre-purchase or reserve models to optimize variable consumption costs through reserved instance models.
Point 6: Are we ready for agility?
Companies that opted for agile models have few options beyond cloud models.
Organizations that need agility have few options outside of cloud technology. We commonly associate agility with variations in the number of users connected to the front-end. For example, most TV companies use cloud front-end because they have no idea how many viewers they will have at any given time.
How to cloud (or not cloud)
Migrating to the cloud is not something to consider just once; you cannot configure your IT environment and forget it. Instead, migrating to the cloud, or multiple clouds is a decision that must be faced repeatedly in almost any organization, as business needs change. And every time you consider migrating a part of your organization to the cloud, remember that the decision cannot be made in isolation.
You need to consider not only the features you need but also how migration might set you up for further evolution. You should also consider how the cloud conforms to your organization’s financial models and security policies, as well as how much it would cost to change. Finally, look at how much agility you need and where you need it.
There’s a lot at stake almost every time you consider migrating to the cloud. If you consider each potential migration from the six perspectives mentioned above, you are more likely to make the right choice.
