As the adoption of cloud services has accelerated over the last few years, Infinitive has delivered an increasing amount of Cloud Health Checks to our clients. We wanted to share how we enhance cloud strategies to achieve your desired business outcomes.

In 2019, only 14% of organizations surveyed by 451 Research reported using no form of cloud computing, and likely that number is smaller today. As companies adjust to a global environment with employees working remotely and more customers doing transactions online, the public cloud’s flexibility and scalability have become even more appealing when unexpected scenarios arise.

According to Cisco, “…the pandemic has prompted 21% of orgs to move more workloads to public clouds to get more capacity.” Today, technology executives are faced with constant decisions to keep applications on premises or move them to the cloud, and overall the larger question whether to take an all-in approach.

Taking an all-in approach can be beneficial, but there are many cases for using a combination of public cloud, private cloud, or on-premises data centers. Your organization needs a solid cloud migration assessment and strategy to determine if, how, and when to move applications to the cloud and how to manage across the different environments to maintain security, integrity, and data consistency.

All-In the Cloud

Definition: Full migration of applications, data, operations, and infrastructure into the cloud.

Pros:

• Cost savings: Moving everything to the cloud minimizes your IT infrastructure and physical data storage needs, which can immediately benefit your bottom line. Cloud providers also offer pay-as-you-go models, which remove costs required to run on-premises services (such as hardware refreshes, ongoing maintenance, data center rental, and physical infrastructure).

• Flexibility: The cloud lets you quickly react to marketplace changes by deploying new services to support customer needs, increasing capacity to adapt to changing demand, and deploying to new cloud regions that are closer to customers, thereby giving them a better experience with reduced load times.

• Agility: You can gain competitive advantages with the ability to deploy new solutions or augment current solutions in a matter of minutes rather than months.

• Security: Cloud providers offer centralized security monitoring and fine-grained user and application access controls across all services. Some organizations worry that cloud environments pose a higher security risk than on-premises, but public clouds actually can be more secure because providers are constantly improving security and staying on top of the latest cybersecurity developments.

• Easy recovery and resiliency: The cloud allows for simple configuration of backup and lifecycle policies across most of its services. Services can be configured to auto-recover from live snapshots or auto-scale to replicate servers when one node goes down.

Cons:

• Change management costs: A culture shift is required to effectively adopt an all-in approach that requires an investment in cloud governance and strategy. You’ll also need to provide additional training for your workforce or hire sought after cloud experts.

• Resourcing: According to a Logicworks survey last year, the majority of respondents (86%) said that finding qualified cloud engineering talent would slow down cloud projects.

• Regulatory compliance: Storing data in the cloud may require additional controls to ensure industry regulatory requirements are met. You may also need to ensure data cannot be moved or replicated across regions, or even across accounts.

• Networking: Issues such as latency may become an issue if there is a need to work with large on-premises data sets or if single millisecond latency is needed for financial transactions

Hybrid Solution

Definition: A mix of cloud and on-premises solutions.

Pros:

• Transition timing: A hybrid solution provides the flexibility to look at business functions and applications on a case-by-case basis to determine the practicality and cost effectiveness of moving said service or solution to the cloud.

• Business continuity: Your organization can continue using legacy systems without having to redevelop applications using cloud native software or lift and shift applications ported direct to the cloud.

• Disaster recovery: Large backup datasets can be stored in the cloud and accessed when needed, thereby allowing costlier, on-premises storage to be used for applications.

Cons:

• Higher investments: Maintaining a dual environment means investing in cloud migrations, hiring people who know how to maintain each environment and building the tools to manage both on-premises and cloud configurations.

• Higher costs: By keeping application, data, and processes in cloud and on-premises locations, you will potentially pay for hardware you aren’t using on-premises while also balancing cloud costs.

• Managing multiple vendors and platforms: Although entirely doable, keeping track of multiple vendors and platforms can be time-consuming and costly.

How do you know which model will work best for your organization? Here are some questions to ask yourself:

• How will my organization benefit from a move to the cloud?

• What financial impacts do we need to consider?

• How will we manage costs in the cloud?

• How will my organization implement cloud technologies and perform in this new operational model?

• How much of our organization’s data is considered extremely sensitive?

• How will we manage security, compliance, and identity and access management in the cloud?

• How will we best leverage our data as part of our organization’s transformational activities?

Moving to the cloud can be a difficult task, especially when you need to continue to hit business goals. Infinitive is here to help guide you through your journey and create efficient, secure, and scalable solutions to prepare for the challenges of tomorrow.

If you’ve already started cloud adoption, the Infinitive Cloud Health Check can help identify ways to do it better and create an improved strategy to achieve business outcomes. If you haven’t started, we can help you identify the best path forward and get you where you need to go.

Get in touch today, and let’s start a conversation.