With the adoption of public cloud on the rise, enterprises are being helped to scale up their operations without the need to invest in new hardware and upgrades. We asked Sachin Bhardwaj, Director Marketing and Business Development, eHosting DataFort, what strategies organisations should have in place when adopting the public cloud.
Today, cloud is a well-known buzzword with leading business executives and business decision makers. The cloud is meant to provide environments that are scalable, reliable and highly available among others. Migrating workloads to the cloud brings with it various benefits.
However, initiating an end-to-end cloud journey for an organisation, as a first step into digital transformation, is a more challenging task. An organisation’s cloud journey involves strong interplay between heads of business and IT decision makers as well as senior management.
For business and IT decision makers, the question is no longer whether to enter the cloud or not. If an organisation is serious about competing in tomorrow’s digital market place, adopting cloud technologies and cloud platforms is the best way to move forward.
Such cloud initiatives bring about an alignment between business and IT, yielding transformation with enhanced competitive differentiation, productivity, agility and reduction of IT costs.
With the adoption of the public cloud on the rise, more and more organisations are integrating a public cloud strategy into their long-term digital transformation plans. Public cloud helps organisations in scaling up their operations with ease without needing to invest in new hardware and upgrades.
They can migrate tons of data to the cloud and reduce thousands of work hours for their IT team in refreshing their onsite systems. Earlier, security was a barrier in public cloud adoption. However, security is now seen as one of its biggest strengths as cloud providers are adopting the latest innovative technologies, security systems and compliance initiatives.
However, once the cloud decision does get a green light, the real challenges rear their heads. Where do you start? Which applications and workloads do you push first? Who are the right vendors? How do you tackle legacy processes? How do you get the teams to co-operate? How do you ensure your management gives you support to transform?
The solution therefore lies in anticipating and planning for all these challenges to reduce the complexity of the cloud journey. Similar to any complex and challenging project, it may also demand expert management.
Migration of data to the cloud is the process of moving business processes, business elements, data and applications, from an onsite premise to a cloud environment. Similar to any migration process, transitioning an IT environment from onsite environment to the cloud, especially the public cloud, has its share of project management and change management challenges.
Among the other operational considerations that need to overcome are concerns around privacy, interoperability, data and application portability, data integrity, business continuity and security. Migrating to the cloud has its share of benefits and hitches and end-user organisations should work with their cloud services provider to identify what is in their best interests.
A cloud services provider can play the role of a trusted partner by assisting in the process of migration to the cloud. This can be done by setting up a proof of concept in partnership with the end user organisation. This will give the end user organisation an idea of the following: comparison of application performance between on-premises and in-cloud; possible points of complexity and failure during migration; network bandwidth required for end-to-end data transfer; and hands-on evaluation of the capability of the cloud services provider.
