Determining the Right Cloud Services for your Enterprise – from Determining Adoption Goal to Uptime!

Globally the public cloud services spending is expected to reach $370 billion in 2022 according to IDC – which is a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.5%. Undoubtedly cloud adoption is the normal scenario in enterprise IT, and its adoption spent is one of the fastest growing among segments in organizations. With the impact of Covid19 – cloud migration literally became a blessing for companies that had to work remotely, and along with that came new scenarios to deal with – security, and accessibility for example. However, here’s something we often forget to consider- adopting a cloud strategy is probably more critical than the actual implementation to achieve the goals. Chances are with no strategy in place, organizations will fall behind their peers in witnessing success and ROIs. With the economy impacted and possible budget cuts, it is all the more important to get the cloud strategies right to leverage on the investments.

Cloud business boomed during the pandemic. Azure’s cloud business grew by 47% which is good news for them – but it also means for many cloud users the costs went up.

So what do organizations need to understand before picking the right cloud services for their environment that will help achieving the larger business goals?

• Align your IT Strategy with Business Goals – Identify the areas that is of importance to help the IT strategy support achieving business goals. It’s essential to engage the IT and business team and have open conversations around objectives. Often times creating a merged team consisting of business and IT executives is helpful or have a dedicated person to liaison in order to bridge the gap. Once this alignment is in place, it is easy to identify the parameters that would form the process of the cloud platform selection.
• Determining the Internet Environment – When it comes to cloud architectures, there are essentially two architypes of network infrastructure. The one that is dependent on the internet for user to hosting region traffic, and Internet-intensive, which primarily relies on the Internet for user-to-hosting-region traffic, and backbone-friendly, which leverages the cloud provider’s private backbone network for user-to-hosting-region traffic. AWS and Alibaba Cloud, for example, are Internet-intensive, while GCP and Azure are more backbone-friendly networks. IBM Cloud is the only provider to alternate between the two, depending on the hosting region. The Internet is a best-effort medium and made up of a constellation of ISP networks that are vulnerable to security threats, DDoS attacks, and outages. Thus it stands to reason that assessing the environment before finalizing the cloud structure is crucial to mitigate the risks.
• Setting the right expectations – So you want cloud infrastructure. That’s great. But do not consider it’s a product with end to end security taken care of completely – cloud is a process. Continuous monitoring, scanning and fixing even the smallest issue becomes a priority to achieve the larger goals of achieving a robust infrastructure. Thus setting the right expectation for the team and getting the buy in from the leadership team to understand the same is critical to pick the right cloud platform.
• Hyperscaling your cloud strategy – Has scaling up been considered in your cloud strategy? Consider the Covid19 pandemic that required organizations to suddenly scale up security for example when most employees needed to work from home. Thus a cloud platform that is agile enough to meet sudden demands is critical to consider while figuring out the provider. Additionally ensure you identify the most critical areas that need support and work on proof of concepts so you don’t end up overspending and also have a solid alternative plan on scaling up in case the PoC fails.
• Consider Multi-Cloud Strategy – You heard it right. Cloud business boomed during the pandemic. Azure’s cloud business grew by 47% which is good news for them – but it also means for many cloud users the costs went up. When not managed well cloud costs can go up and thus having a multi- cloud strategy is a good idea. For enterprises that adopt public cloud services most prefer to use multiple providers. – 81% of public cloud users work with two or more providers. Some of the biggest advantages of multi- cloud strategy is better disaster recovery, easy migration for some data and applications, avoiding vendor- lock in, cost saving, and lowered risks of DDoS attacks.
• Determining which data to be migrated to cloud and which shouldn’t – Organizations need to consider that just because it is possible to migrate to cloud doesn’t mean you have to and all of it have to. Once the reason to moving to cloud has been determined clearly, determine which data or application should be on cloud and which should be on – premise to make it more cost- effective. A lot of times the assumption that cloud will make things easier is a mistake – it depends on a lot of factors.
• Research Uptime – When researching cloud options, find out about the uptime or operational resiliency that a public cloud option can provide. Outages lead to higher costs and losing customer confidence for many organizations, and thus cloud uptime is extremely crucial for any business. Cloud services are important and it can be expensive and will require businesses to hire a standby dedicated personnel to manage downtime – but how much the providers will put in effort to reduce downtime should be an important criteria to search about – because the risks of losing revenue is probably higher than the cost of cloud itself.

The Covid 19 situation has accelerated cloud technologies adoption by IT decision makers globally, and this is expected to continue in future. About 82% respondents in survey indicated ramping up of cloud as an immediate response to the pandemic and the sudden increase of remote working. While the growth of the cloud market due to pandemic has shown the how a crisis could completely transform the operations, it has also got businesses to spend more on cloud and security to support the remote working employees. Businesses will need to do a much more deep dive into its cloud adoption goals and strategies once situation settles down and assess the investments and returns to ensure that cost and quality of performance is not hugely impacted.

Check out this blog on how to determine which among the two gians – AWS and Azure is a good fit for your enterprise!

~M.C.