With the constantly evolving IT landscape, more and more companies are considering moving their on-premise infrastructure to either a fully-fledged cloud infrastructure or a hybrid solution.
The Covid pandemic made companies realize that on-premise infrastructure is not always needed as most of their employees could work from home and still be productive or more productive than being at the office. This caused companies to change their mindset to migrating to a Cloud Service Provider and the financial impact it will have for the company.
There are several considerations for companies when looking at a cloud transformation, and these include which Cloud Service Provider will be used, for example, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Google Cloud. A more important consideration for the company will be where their data will be located, how safe it will be and how accessible the data will be. With the implementation of several data governing laws and legislation for the different countries, companies need to ensure that the data is stored and protected appropriately.
Another big consideration that needs to be evaluated is the financial impact it will have on the company. Moving an on-premise server infrastructure to a cloud infrastructure will remove the need to manage and maintain physical or virtual devices. Furthermore, it will reduce the company's hardware footprint, thus reducing electricity consumption, hardware maintenance, and additional hardware purchases.
When looking at these considerations, a company needs to compare the cost of hosting their resources in the cloud and the possible return of investment (ROI) for the company.
Hosting resources and services in the cloud are charged on a per-usage basis. Depending on the company's need for specific resources or services, it needs to evaluate the cost of hosting it and compare it to the current running on-premise infrastructure costs.
Assessing the current infrastructure and identifying specific services that will stay on-premise versus services being moved to the cloud will also be critical when considering a hybrid cloud deployment model.
With different Cloud Service Providers available careful consideration and evaluation need to be conducted to ensure the company chooses the correct provider. Different services available, the location of datacentres, Service Level Agreements and the security of the data are key components that need to be thoroughly investigated before deciding on a certain cloud provider.
The key to a successful cloud migration is proper research, planning and implementation of the solution.
One of the biggest challenges associated with such a migration is user adoption. To ensure a smooth transition and a quicker user acceptance of new technologies, a company needs to prepare and educate all users. This can be achieved by identifying employees from different departments as cloud advocates.
At the end of the day, a happy cloud infrastructure will result in happy cloud productive employees.
Happy clouding
Louis G