Correct cloud transformation strategy helps push your business to the next level
Cloud transformation using DevOps methodology is a great way for any business to become more cost-efficient and ensure the stability and predictability of IT operations. Running your data and applications in the cloud means reduced OPEX, removes the need for CAPEX, ensures scalability, security, shorter time-to-market for new product features — why would you not want it? Cloud computing ensures operational resilience for your operations and provides other tangible business benefits in comparison to dedicated or on-prem servers.
The issue here is that the cloud is quite a complicated system, despite all the marketing slogans and promises, and running it efficiently is possible only in two cases — building your systems using vendor-specific tools that were intended to work together (and result in vendor lock-in) or employ external expertise to efficiently combine cloud-native and open-source tools to build modular, cloud-agnostic infrastructures that ensure operational resilience and reduced expenses. In order to help reach your business objectives, the cloud transformation strategy must be correctly planned, configured and managed.
Basic cloud transformation strategy points
To form a feasible cloud transformation strategy, the business must answer multiple important questions. The exact list differs based on your business niche and project requirements, yet the basic points are always the same.
- can an application be lifted-and-shifted or should you rebuild it from scratch in the cloud?
- what infrastructure components will remain in the cloud and what must be ditched out and replaced with cloud-native components?
- what data processing strategy will be used? Will your data be stored in public, private, hybrid or multi-cloud environments?
- will you migrate the data to the cloud and if yes — how will you do it?
- will you implement Big Data analytics from the start or plan to do it sometime later?
- will you try to perform cloud transformation internally or hire external experts?
While cloud transformation promises multiple benefits to your business, it requires investments at a huge scale and should be approached with the utmost seriousness. You must understand all the impact and alternatives of the questions listed above.
- Application. If your application was built some 5+ years ago it can be very monolithic and cannot be split to microservices in order to scale well. It must be either lifted-and-shifted as is to be containerized or rewritten from scratch using RESTful APIs to interact between microservices and ensure much better cost-efficiency.
- System components. Every business builds its IT infrastructure based on their skills, technology and budget. With time, many components become obsolete and are best replaced with cloud-native components providing similar functionality.
- Data storage and processing. The public cloud is the cheapest and most scalable variant. If legal regulations demand your data to reside within the boundaries of a certain country (for financial or medical applications, i.e.), you can hire a portion of public cloud and make it private, so the platform ensures your data is stored within a certain geographical location and never leaves it. Hybrid systems ensure the data is securely stored on-prem but is processed using cloud computing systems. The multi-cloud strategy helps build modular cloud systems where the AWS components work along with GCP analogs for maximum efficiency
- Data migration. Your application stores data in some database that might not perform so well in the cloud. Therefore, sometimes a data migration to another database is required during the cloud transformation.
- Big Data analytics. Implementing such systems costs a lot but is voluntary. If your business does not need it at the moment, it can totally be avoided — just make sure the required structural preparations are done, so you are able to implement Big Data later down the track.
- Contractor. You might want to trust this task to your in-house IT team and risk paying dearly for costly mistakes — or order cloud transformation from your cloud service provider and end up with lock-in — or work with an experienced Managed Services Provider like IT Svit, who will be able to deliver the cloud transformation services and accomplish your project successfully.
Thus said, if you want to experience all the benefits of the cloud transformation and bring your business to a new level of efficiency — IT Svit is ready to help!
