The Journey to the cloud is fraught with pitfalls. The only way to prevent cloud adoption turning into a vortex that pulls in vast amounts of budget and human resources, taking up all your team's time with tasks that could have been avoided, is a proper, highly detailed assessment.
It needs to be carried out by an independent partner that understands your business’ needs and that your applications and workloads are your business and need to be treated as such.
Let's be frank here, a lift-and-shift approach might seem like a good idea, but when the bills start piling up after 3-6 months and security issues rear their ugly heads, regret begins to set in. The assessment is just the first of many critical steps of the cloud journey, but it is without doubt of paramount importance, as it sets the scene for the entire project and becomes the key indicator of success or failure because the simple fact is that just because something can go the cloud doesn't mean that it should.
Equipped with experience from successful cloud migration assessments for large multinational organisations, we’re ready to assist any business, regardless their size or complexity. Our client base spans 300 African enterprises, across all verticals, including but not limited to the manufacturing, wholesale and retail trade, financial services, transport, mining, agriculture and tourism sectors.
Security remains your responsibility, not that of the hyper-scaler
Information security spend is expected to reach $123.8 billion by the end of 2020. The coronavirus pandemic is driving short-term demand in areas such as cloud adoption, remote worker technologies and, for the most, part cyber security.
When one considers the cloud, one cannot separate infrastructure from security. Whilst the hyper-scalers are responsible for securing their data centres, the business is responsible for securing their own workloads.
This means that organisations need to develop their own governance strategies and cloud security frameworks to prevent data exfiltration and reputationally damaging security breaches, what with new challenges such as managing external sources joining virtual meetings from unsecured networks and rolling out security patches to remote-work environments over VPN.
Is your business cloud-ready?
A comprehensive assessment should be part of every pre-migration plan and cloud strategy. This kind of analysis assists businesses to undertake compatibility checks, and optimise their business workloads to function efficiently. This detailed process also allows for the right-sizing of the environment, which will prevent costs from spiralling in the future.
Take time to map out your business services and the critical dependencies to determine whether it’s cloud-ready. Some workloads may be better off staying right where they are.
“Measure twice, migrate once” is what we always say.
Understanding cloud-readiness is fundamental before any cloud migration journey. Without a thorough understanding of your application landscape and the compute requirements for each workload, a business is unable to highlight potential shortcomings and might rely on an inefficient lift-and-shift cloud migration process.
This could result in cloud consumption ballooning and IT costs increasing significantly. When this happens, businesses tend to take the approach of “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t” and migrate back to the comfort of their own on-prem data centres. Assessments can also be done retrospectively, which will assist to right-size application resource requirements, while optimising performance and keeping costs manageable.
Why in-source, when you can outsource?
While there are multiple public cloud providers to choose from, it’s important to consider which one is best suited to your business’ requirements and budget.
Businesses can rely on their in-house IT staff utilising the migration guides and tools provided by their chosen cloud platform, or an end-to-end migration service that will handle everything in a hassle-free, efficient manner.
By outsourcing the cloud migration process, businesses don’t need to undertake the time-consuming process of training their staff, more often than not this approach turns out to be more cost effective, when you consider that it minimises down time and doesn’t take attention away from the projects that your in-house IT team are currently busy with. This is especially true as many IT teams are not prepared for the plethora of new challenges and complexities that mass migrations bring in a short space of time.
Performance as a priority
“Cheaper is not always better”. With that said, cost savings should never be to the detriment of performance. By accurately optimising workloads, business services can be streamlined to perform optimally whilst at the same time keeping costs in check. Critical to any cloud transition project is ensuring that cloud services offer equal or better performance, without disrupting business operations.
This can only be achieved with thorough visibility of the complete business service and an understanding of what each of its components require to function optimally.
It's key to understand that performance optimisation is not a once-off exercise, application resource demands are dynamic, driven by fluctuating business demand. Performance needs to be continuously managed in order to yield ideal results.
Regardless of your cloud maturity, we can add value! Trust us to be your independent cloud agnostic advisor.
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