Moving to “the cloud” seems to be the thing to do in IT these days. A lot of businesses have or are thinking about moving to the cloud and the majority of these are moving to Public Cloud.
According to Gartner the overall Public Cloud services market is projected to grow 21.4% in 2018 alone. But you need to ask yourself why am I doing this and what benefits can it bring.
Which Cloud Platform?
Obviously moving to cloud is championed as moving to Public Cloud like AWS, or Azure but there are a number of Private Cloud offerings also available as well as Hybrid Cloud - a combination of both Public and Private Cloud.
Debunking the Myths
Firstly let’s explore some of the common myths and perceptions about Cloud Provision:
- The cloud provider looks after security
- I don’t have to worry about backups
- Running costs are very cheap
- Quick and easy to set up
These are just a few of the popular phrases we have heard regarding cloud. In reality all cloud vendors do provide a level of security but the IT team have to also ensure their entities are secured. A lot of data breaches occur because of poorly configured architecture.
While some services come with a degree of resilience the actual backup of data remains the responsibility of the IT Team.
Running costs are reasonable if you are running servers in development and test environments and can turn them off but a misconfigured or overspecified environment can get really costly and unbudgeted costs for continuous running can also be prohibitive.
While it is easy to configure a small number of servers on cloud platforms - in reality to ensure a correctly architected infrastructure takes more than a bit of time and thinking.
Defining the Migration Path
As mentioned the biggest issue with cloud is often understanding what benefits you actually want public cloud to deliver. If you just want to utilise SAAS offerings like Office 365 or IAAS offerings like AWS EC2 instances this can be relatively straight -forward and can save money, where correctly implemented and configured.
A lot of the real advantage of cloud is the use of serverless architecture for application delivery. No infrastructure to worry about makes for a lot of savings. This area is in its infancy but can really make a difference, the problem however lies in the fact that most application vendors do not yet have the ability to take advantage of this new offering
In this case using a private cloud vendor may provide a solution where you move to a private cloud to leverage the advantages of high availability, ensure backups are carried out, security is controlled and cost is managed with a view to having an easier transition to public cloud in the future.
The next step is them moving on to Hybrid solution where you can the redevelop the application to use the advantage of public for cloud edge computing while keeping the core of the application in a safe controlled environment. This you get the best of both worlds. This allows you to move workloads one at a time reducing overall spend and complexity.
De-Risking Your Move To The Cloud
As you can see there is a lot of things to consider when you are thinking of moving to cloud. The safest way to proceed is to consult with experts to help plan this journey for you. Here at ICE ICT we have a number of clients who are transitioning to cloud and we work closely with them with every step of the journey
If you would like to know how we can help you with your cloud transition or just would like some advice, contact us now here.
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