Millions of organizations have now adopted cloud computing, but many are still missing out on the full spectrum of benefits that the cloud can deliver.
The truth is, many executives wrongly believe that running their workloads in the cloud is far simpler than it actually is and end up paying the price later. They move into the cloud with incorrect assumptions and take many missteps along the way.
The key to avoiding the common mistakes is being thoroughly informed. In that vein, here are my top 4 tips to ensure you’ll receive the greatest return on your cloud investment:
1. Plan
This one might seem straightforward, but we see many organizations ignore significant factors for success in the initial stages of their cloud journey.
It’s important that your organization dedicates the adequate amount of time for intentional and thorough planning before making your move to the cloud.
Companies will sometimes implement cloud computing solutions in an ad hoc or fragmented manner, or they’ll leverage the cloud for only certain applications or environments without considering the impact on the rest of the business.
Others jump in full-force – rapidly moving everything over to the cloud when they shouldn’t have. These scenarios consistently result in a massive – and unforeseen – strain on resources and budget.
A solid cloud services strategy needs to consider all the ways the business can minimize risk, manage costs, increase production, provide agility and achieve its desired business objectives.
You must fully understand your capacity needs, and the internal capabilities required to support them.
Cloud Computing Planning Checklist
- Document all of the concerns for your organization, and choose the partners and solutions that align.
- Identify which parts of the business can safely and efficiently be moved into the cloud.
- Pinpoint issues that could impede your organization’s cloud adoption process.
Comprehensive and thoughtful planning is absolutely critical to receiving the greatest yield on your cloud investment.
2. Train
Migrating to the cloud is only the beginning. Now you need to manage it, and managing the cloud is far different than managing your physical infrastructure.
You’ll need to invest dollars in training your internal team to handle this new technology, or you can leverage an external cloud-experienced vendor for support.
For our clients, we typically recommend setting up a dedicated cloud team, or a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE).
This team could exist solely within your organization, or be a combination of both internal and external individuals.
Your CCoE is constantly focused on ways to increase the value and efficiency of the cloud within your business. They work to:
- Drive the organization to the next stage of cloud maturity.
- Establish governance on resources and cost.
- Manage any issues that arise.
- Implement new, efficient services, and ensure that your selected providers are delivering on the performance that was expected.
3. Measure
Once your cloud technology and teams are up and running, it’s not time to relax. At this point, you’ll want to ensure your cloud services are delivering the anticipated results.
What was imperative to you when you first made the decision to migrate? Was it Speed? Scalability? Security? All of the above?
It’s important that you are continually measuring and assessing your cloud technology – and have a solid process and tools in place to do so. The good news is you can leverage a multitude of monitoring technologies as well as your cloud provider’s services to measure your cost-performance ratios and resource utilization. You can then tweak and adjust your workloads as needed to achieve the best combination of cost-effectiveness and optimal performance.
Learn How Auxis’ Cloud Design Solution Uncovered 30% Cost Savings for Global Timeshare Resort Leader
4. Automate
The final stage for optimizing the value of your cloud investment is to automate. The goal of cloud automation is to make everything as fast, efficient and hands-off as possible – translating into cost reduction or better utilization of your cloud teams. This can be done through the combination of software and script language-based technologies such as Chef, Puppet and Terraform.
Automation is meant to alleviate the complexity that comes with cloud computing orchestration.
For example, if you have web-based applications, leveraging automation would allow you to enable your developers to quickly update and deploy code to production without directly involving your infrastructure team.
In the traditional model, your team would need to provision the right infrastructure to accommodate the requirements from the developers. This process would tie up multiple resources and take valuable time. And as the saying goes, time is money.
Automation allows for all of those steps to be done accurately and within minutes – freeing your team to do more advantageous things for the business.
As you can see, simply adopting cloud technology for your business does not mean you will immediately realize cost savings or improved efficiencies. There are many crucial steps to getting it right.
Auxis offers a unique methodology that makes the entire cloud migration process seamless, efficient and cost-effective. From vendor selection to automating your cloud computing technologies – we’ve got you completely covered.
Talk to one of our Cloud Experts. Schedule your consultation
