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Enterprises are no longer deciding whether to move some or all of their information technology (IT) infrastructure to the cloud, but rather when to migrate these workloads and how to manage the transition with minimal business disruption. Indeed, Gartner forecasts a 20.7% increase in end-user public cloud spending to reach $591.8 billion in 2023—a significant bump up from the $490.3 billion spent in 2022.
Shifting to the cloud successfully is a significant undertaking with a measure of challenges companies often underestimate, including difficult choices about rehosting, replatforming, revising, refactoring, or replacing existing software applications. Companies must also determine the ideal blend of public cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments to support their business goals.
But accessing the speed and agility of the public cloud doesn’t have to be overly complex. Follow these five steps to simplify your public cloud journey and avoid the wrong turns and missteps that can hamper modernization pathways and undermine your capacity for continuous innovation and seamless service.
1. Leverage the Existing Knowledge and Skills of Your On-Prem IT Team.
Your IT teams are hands-on with your existing on-prem infrastructure and have maintained the infrastructure required to support all existing workloads for years. Although cloud practices require a broad understanding of a variety of disciplines, it’s important to harness your current team’s deep knowledge to develop a public cloud migration plan that understands your critical applications and workloads and delivers public cloud benefits to your company sooner. Your IT team can help you understand:
The on-prem experience of your IT talent can effectively translate to public cloud environments with comprehensive support, training, and experience. Engage your IT teams in training programs and encourage cross-training in order to close the cloud skills gap and prepare them to support workloads within public and hybrid infrastructures.
2. Clarify the Benefits and Complexities of Public Cloud Adoption.
Despite widespread public cloud adoption, myths and misunderstandings about its value, cost efficiencies, and ease of migration persist. Establish a clear-eyed view of the journey to the public cloud across your organization to minimize internal friction as you design and implement your migration plan. Here’s what your teams need to know:
Public cloud accelerates business infrastructure modernization. Scaling up on-prem infrastructure is slower than expanding your public cloud environment and relies on hardware that can be impacted by supply chain bottlenecks. With a public cloud, you can almost instantly deploy compute resources and increase data storage in response to business opportunities and customer demand.
Public cloud enables the agility of DevOps continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). You can build, test, and deploy applications and services at a greater velocity in the public cloud.
Public cloud shifts your infrastructure from a CapEx to OpEx model. Right-sizing on-prem and private environments is challenging and slow. With the public cloud and infrastructure as a service, you can scale up or scale down on demand based on your unique needs.
The public cloud journey does not happen with the flick of a switch. It’s important that enterprises take a measured, strategic approach to public cloud migration, so that they shift the right workloads and optimize outcomes. It is critical that you define all changes required for people, process, and technology.
Many companies choose a hybrid cloud model. Good reasons to keep some data in private, on-prem environments include compliance requirements, highly sensitive data security, and the need to provide greater workload control and flexibility, especially with large datasets.
3. Create a Clear Migration Strategy and Involve Your CEO.
Poor cloud migration coordination costs companies an average 14% more than planned and leads to migration delays that slow innovation, according to a survey of chief information officers (CIOs) by McKinsey. The same survey revealed the top drivers of cloud migration success for outperforming companies, which include:
4. Automate Public Cloud Security Processes.
All public cloud benefits can be undermined in an instant with data security breaches and ransomware attacks. Protect the widespread data in your cloud infrastructure[1] by automating critical security processes, including server management, patching, incident ticketing, security checks, alerts, responses, and more.
5. Harness Public Cloud Tools to Optimize Outcomes.
The cloud delivers the speed and agility that enterprises need to do what they do best. Companies use integrated, prebuilt cloud tools and solutions to quickly harness the power of the cloud for their business. Examples of these tools include:
Infrastructure as a service (IaaS): Gain cloud compute, network, and storage on demand and pay as you use with IaaS.
Infrastructure as code (IaC): Reduce manual processes in the CI/CD pipeline, and test and deploy applications faster and more securely.
Cloud analytics: Analytics provide a critical, continual window into your resource requirements throughout migration and after. Analytics tools enable your teams to see dependencies and pinpoint risks during plan creation, as well as validate the success of data migrations from legacy systems to the cloud.
Go more in depth with our Vice President of Cloud and MSP Solutions, Daniel Clydesdale-Cotter, on our newest offering, Eva STaaS. Webinar is June 7th at 1PM.
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Matt Hoeg
Director, MDC Technology
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