As per IDG Cloud computing survey, 92% of organization’s IT environment is at least somewhat in the cloud today. If you are in those 8% who have not adopted cloud yet, you are clearly missing out on the benefits that other organizations are getting. By now, I am sure you know the most benefits that Cloud infrastructure offers, but let’s refresh it once more –
- More Resiliency – The cloud providers scale up and down as per your seasonal needs. It is the most ideal way to support your growth, as you don’t need to purchase and hold assets for a peak requirement, but you can adjust as you go along.
- Less Headache – You don’t need to keep an army of people to upkeep your servers, manage security and hardware failures. You can sleep well knowing that the cloud providers are well-equipped in security and disaster recovery capabilities to ensure safekeeping of your assets and data. You, of course, need help to plan, configure and monitor it, but once you get the setup right, it is a smooth journey.
- Access to new capabilities – The cloud providers offer advanced capabilities and services that make your life easier. With a competitive market, the more and more services are being made available and the cost is going down. In 2021 AWS: reinvent, Amazon announced more than 50 new services on the top a very mature array of services. You can access these capabilities with a click of button, right from document storage to artificial intelligence, and create growth opportunities for your business.
- Potentially less cost – I am being careful here as many organizations have seen increased monthly spend when they compare with their current ‘infrastructure’ costs. However, if you look at it holistically by adding people/process/tools costs of running your current (and future business), the cloud costs will be potentially much lesser.
If you are convinced and are thinking of adopting cloud for your business, what should be your strategy for adoption?
There are following three popular strategies that our customers have adopted –
- Lift and Shift
If you have a portfolio of applications on your premise, the fastest way to address your ‘cloud adoption’ business case is by lifting and shifting your applications cloud. It makes sense if you are going to get rid of your data center (or hosting provider) and save money on operations by migrating to cloud.
Although you can do it manually by evaluating every application, for a portfolio of applications, tool-based migration process is preferred. There is a very strong tooling ecosystem for AWS, including its own Cloud endure ( now AWS MGN), to support the migration. The tools can help you right from ‘Discovery and Planning’, ‘Creating a business case’, Migration and also post-migration ‘Monitoring and Support’. - Fit and Shift
It is my favorite option as it lets you leverage the new capabilities that Cloud offers while preserving the value of your legacy investments. It includes selectively replacing components of your current application by ‘cloud managed’ components. For example, you can swap an Oracle database for AWS RDS, and reduce your license costs and maintenance efforts. As you are developing a strategy by assessing every application, it takes a longer time (~8-12 weeks for 30 applications) to define your migration strategy, but your potential benefits are likely to be much higher than just ‘lifting and shifting’ to cloud.
- Don’t Shift, Go Native
If you are convinced that your legacy is not going to support your future growth, it is better to re-architect your applications and re-develop using cloud native capabilities. The cloud provides many platform services to rapidly build and deploy a ‘cloud-native’ application, so it may not be overly expensive option. For a global association of risk professionals, we recently re-developed their mission-critical financial risk estimation application within just 2 months, by reusing their existing python based code and leveraging AWS serverless and RDS services. This approach not only saved the development and maintenance costs, but also provided a scalable solution to onboard new associates very easily.
In conclusion, the cloud provides significant benefits to your business and there are proven strategies to adopt the cloud. Futran, in partnership with AWS, helps organizations to define the migration strategies and adopt it in cost-effective, risk-free way. Please contact a Futran Cloud Specialist if you want to know more about how we can help.
