Whether you are looking to migrate your applications or infrastructure to the cloud or shut down the on-premises data center, here are a few practices you should abide by.
- Make a cloud-first commitment
All applications should be moved to the cloud unless there is a compelling reason to remain on-premises. This is what cloud-first commitment means. However, there can be compelling reasons like cost, security or governance challenges and concerns that may force you to keep some applications in a data center within your organization. Ensure that public and private cloud integrates easily. Regardless of the circumstances, prioritize a cloud-first strategy so that you can reap maximum benefits of the cloud.
- Understand your cloud economics
Understanding the economic side of the cloud may appear simple. However, most organizations do not take the time to understand the needs of their businesses and what it takes financially to move to the cloud. By building a business case, your organization will gain valuable insights to enable you to understand cloud economics. Understand aspects like current costs, and the cost of the entire package. Other costs like hardware, networking, disaster recovery, downtime, upgrades and service level agreements should also be understood.
- Decide the cloud services to use
Given the many cloud services available, businesses must identify the ones that suit them and the ones they plan to deploy. This will reduce the chances of running more services than necessary or than can be managed appropriately. Furthermore, it may result in failing to determine the right way which cloud services are best fitted to the workloads. The right services may vary from one workload and business to another. Businesses must generally consider factors like the cost of each type of cloud service, how hard or easy it is to deploy workloads on a cloud service, how a service can be managed and monitored, or the security risks that a particular service can create.
- Understand what should not be migrated to the cloud
Businesses should know that certain workloads may be better if left out of the cloud migration plans. For instance, applications that depend on local networking configurations can be difficult to replicate in the cloud. Other applications may need direct access to the hardware, which can be difficult to achieve or can be costly to be done in the cloud. Identification of these apps should be made early in the cloud transition. Develop steps for modification of those applications to suit the cloud or commit to keeping those apps out of the cloud.
- Find out security risks
Migrating to the cloud is not free of security challenges. Therefore, before migrating your data, applications and infrastructure, ensure you know that the cloud can be a source of various concerns. Because of the connection of the cloud to the internet by default, it can be easy for attackers to locate and exploit weaknesses in cloud resources. The complexity of the cloud and possible misconfigurations that emerge from it, like allowing public access to sensitive storage, can have unprecedented implications concerning security. Therefore, you must assess how to mitigate the identified security risks as part of the cloud transition plan.