Cloud readiness assessment.
Cloud readiness assessment is an essential first step for organizations looking to migrate to the cloud. It is a process involving an examination of your applications and data that you want to move to the cloud with minimal impact on operational continuity.
The goal is to obtain a gap analysis to identify which applications will require one of several solutions, re-factoring, re-hosting, re-platforming, re-purchasing, or retiring.
Tips for a successful cloud readiness assessment:
- Have a solid business case for cloud migration
- Categorize your workloads and desired outcomes
- Establish a cloud operating model
- Estimate timeline and budgets
- Prioritize what application to move first
- Craft dependency maps of your applications
- Test adequately
- Emphasize the importance of security
Cloud roadmap & strategy.
Moving to the cloud is never going to be an easy task. A cloud roadmap is a visualisation of how a company will transition to the cloud to help keep focus on the long-term objectives while solving problems along the way. Cloud strategy roadmaps divide a cloud strategy into three main phases: planning, infrastructure and implementation.
Business value of a cloud roadmap:
- Identifies business, operations, technical and expense drivers
- Identifies appropriate cloud service delivery models (IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS)
- Analyzes cloud deployment models (public, private, hybrid, managed hosted)
- Identifies and analyzes potential vendor cloud solutions
- Assesses operating and integration risks
- Identifies security, regulatory, compliance and policy implications
- Analyzes the benefits, risks and costs of cloud computing alternatives
- Documents a cloud strategy, roadmap and plan
Cloud optimization.
IT leaders are under pressure to find savings and cut costs in their organizations. Cloud optimization is the process of analyzing and configuring the allocation of cloud resources that power applications, infrastructures, and workloads to maximize performance and minimize waste due to over-provisioning.
The goal of cloud optimization is to reverse this trend. Cloud optimization frameworks seek to achieve absolute cost efficiency and optimal performance (while adhering to compliance policies).
Best practices implementing cloud optimization:
- Efficient utilization of reserved instances and resources
- Considering microservices or going serverless
- Setting a cloud governance structure
- Awareness of cloud costs and cloud value
Business continuity plan (BCE).
Business Continuity is critical for companies of any size. A well-defined plan can provide a lifeline and allow your organization to face the unexpected. The cloud offers timely and error-free data recovery for business continuity. SaaS and cloud offerings typically include more redundancy and resiliency against potential outages than an individual company can afford to establish and maintain.
How cloud computing supports business continuity:
- Reduces downtime
- Provides better network and information security management
- Scales to suit your business needs
- Helps reduce impact in disruption of service (DoS) attacks
- Removes the need to stand up and maintain a costly physical mirror site of your infrastructure
- Eliminates the need to sync software on two sites
- Reduces recovery time to as little as a few minutes — potentially
- Eliminates the need to travel to a remote site in potentially difficult or dangerous circumstances