Deciding to move your business to the cloud must be approached strategically. There are many benefits of cloud migration, but you need to weigh your options before making that critical decision. Here are some considerations to keep in mind:
Private, public, or hybrid?
On a private cloud, you have a dedicated infrastructure for your business, managed either by your own team or third-party providers. Your organisation will have its own dedicated hardware, running on private network and located on or off premises.
Public cloud is over a non-private network and available for multiple users. It is usually off-site and is pay-per-usage, as it shares resources over various customers.
Hybrid cloud combines private and traditional IT with a public cloud. It is usually used to scale up and down your infrastructure systems to meet demand needs.
Evaluate current infrastructure utilisation and availability
Look at your performance and capacity reports to see how you can address workloads on the cloud and decide whether to release unused capacity for other workloads or simply move them over and avoid new investments.
When choosing a cloud service provider (CSP), you need to check if the infrastructure is ready for your workload. Thoroughly assess your architecture, and its complexity and determine whether you can completely shift to the cloud or whether it makes more sense to move only several applications to the cloud while keeping the rest on-premises.
Don’t forget to take into consideration where the cloud data centre is located and make sure the proposed available service level agreements (SLAs) meet your business requirements.
Backup policies and disaster recovery
Do your backup policies fit with your cloud provider? Cloud providers can have standard backup policies with some level of customisation. It is worth it to have a look at those to see if they are suitable for your company before it may become a roadblock. Important things to pay attention to include retention frequency, backup type, and versioning.
Recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) are important values that define how much data you are willing to lose and what amount of time you are willing to allow for the data to be restored. CSPs may have different RTO and RPO considerations than what you have in your current managed services provider or on-premises environment. It’s worth noting and checking into before you end up in a situation where your recovery from backup isn’t sufficient to avoid disruption.
Security
Determine requirements for the tools you’ll need during migration, identify which data needs to be migrated and if you’ll need encryption of the data both at rest and in transit.
Implementation of well-defined security policies is a must for ensuring adequate security of the applications in the cloud. Ask your CSP about what security standards they follow.
User Experience
Migration to the cloud will change the way how users access their applications. Therefore, it is important to consider the possible impact on the user experience in the planning phase itself.
Integration is another thing to keep in mind. Understanding application dependencies is important in planning a cloud migration. Organisations need to address these dependencies to avoid unplanned outages and limited functionality.
Cost-Effectiveness
Work with cloud providers to understand the options for cost savings given your proposed cloud deployment. Cloud providers offer multiple resources or a commitment to a certain level of cloud spend.
A couple of pieces that may be potentially costly to your organisation are egress and API. Egress means traffic that exits an entity or a network boundary. API (application programming interfaces) is a way for one program to interact with another. API calls are the medium by which they interact – a message sent to a server asking an API to provide a service or information. Be sure to ask cloud service providers how much they charge for egress and API calls.
If you would like to take the next step and are ready to move your business to the cloud, speak with one of the members of our team.
