Prepare for take-off – your journey to the cloud awaits

Modernising your IT technology by moving applications and data into the cloud is not a new concept. More and more organisations are undertaking this migration, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all process. But what does a cloud journey entail? How can you make the migration to cloud technology easier? How long does it take? Do you need to become fully cloud-based? Is it even right for you?

We’ve put together and updated this handy guide to starting your cloud journey, what to expect, and where to start so that you can plan and develop your strategy with your journey to the cloud.

Is it necessary to migrate to the cloud?

In today’s business landscape, there is one constant your business can rely on: change. The IT systems your business uses at present are bound to undergo transformations within months, if not weeks. That’s how quickly things change in this sphere. As businesses advance and adapt, expand and venture into new territories, constantly improving and disrupting industries through pioneering digital technologies, it becomes evident that your IT needs will evolve accordingly.

In today’s climate, modern infrastructure is the foundation for a successful organisation. By providing the capability to swiftly create secure and scalable applications, it empowers businesses to foster innovation and be able to support new products and services or transform business processes. Updating business infrastructure helps businesses to collaborate more effectively, both internally and externally, by providing secure web-based and mobile access to shared data and apps, from any place, at any time. 

In our opinion, migrating to the cloud is an obvious path, enabling you to modernise and future-proof your IT stack. 

Step 1: Pack for success. And pack light for your cloud journey.

As with any journey, deciding what to take with you is critical. Early adopters of cloud technology which were part of a digital transformation programme employed a basic ‘lift and shift’ approach, choosing to migrate lighter workloads in their entirety to the cloud, whilst keeping some of their larger legacy pieces on-premise.

Unfortunately, this has led them away from discovering the truly creative, operational and financial benefits of cloud migration. Generally, enterprises at this stage of their journey will manage to migrate 20-30% of their workloads to the cloud, leaving the remaining 70-80% still requiring modernisation; contrary to their belief that they’re ahead of the curve, they’re actually lagging behind.

So, how do you plan a more conclusive journey to the cloud from the outset? Start by analysing all business workloads and prioritise those which would benefit from modernisation and break down applications into microservices to deploy to the cloud in smaller, more agile clusters.

Compartmentalising (or containerising, to use the appropriate parlance) your data and apps using a system such as Kubernetes provides flexibility, scalability, integrity, security and cost-effectiveness which has previously not been possible.

This way, your business will quickly start to see the value of cloud computing. And of course, as experts in cloud migration, we can help you choose what stays at home and what comes with you on your trip. 

Step 2: Plan the best route for you.

Now that you’ve decided what to pack on your journey, planning which route to take is the next step. You’ll want to avoid congested routes and those which are unsuitable for your chosen vehicle. You might also benefit from guidance from an experienced navigator who has travelled the route before. 

There are three options to choose from when deploying workloads to the cloud: 

• Private Cloud

  is cloud infrastructure reserved solely for a single organisation, whether managed internally or by a third party and hosted either internally or externally in a data centre. A private cloud can often provide greater levels of security, where the data sits behind enterprise firewalls and has limited exposure to the outside world. Organisations that are facing strict regulatory and compliance rules as well as managing data sovereignty typically follow this pattern of cloud migration.

• Public Cloud 

  is where the infrastructure sits in a network that is open for public use. There is little to no difference between public and private cloud architecture, save for security considerations you’ll have to make depending on what kind of data you’re migrating. The phrase ‘open for public use’ might set alarm bells ringing, but these networks are still restricted in terms of who and what can get in and out of them. They still undergo security penetration tests and ethical hacking to ensure that they are secure. We work with some of the biggest cloud platforms, or hyperscalers, including Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS, all of whom lead the way in security developments.

• Hybrid Cloud

  is a composition of two or more clouds (private or public) that remain distinct entities but are integrated, offering the benefits of multiple deployment models. In more sophisticated configurations these allow workloads to move between private (on-premise) and public clouds based on rules which could manage spikes in demand, scheduled maintenance work, or cloud transformation projects where applications have undergone modernisation.  

It can be difficult to identify the suitable route at this stage, but we, your experienced navigator, can help with this. We consider the size of the workload you’re migrating, the nature of your data and subsequent security needs and your operational requirements. We will then suggest the best route to get to your destination and provider you should go with. 

Step 3: Leaving the runway

Once you have a solid plan for cloud migration, your journey to the cloud can get underway. 

Microservices & APIs

Breaking down your applications into microservices and APIs gives you the flexibility to architect your applications as you want, provides greater possibilities where scalability is concerned, and enables continuous delivery without disruption. Running these microservices in a containerised environment provides a consistent and isolated environment for deploying, running and managing these services.

Adopt a DevOps approach  

By incorporating governance standards into your infrastructure before deploying applications into it, you ensure that the application’s delivery is high quality and giving yourself peace of mind that security will remain effective and repeatable. 

Test often and deploy quickly 

The above allows a business team to learn and iterate at pace, developing a minimum viable product. This can vary in shape and size for organisations especially when replacing or re-inventing an existing application. The key here is small iterations that quickly build the replacement.

Employ an assistant 

Not a physical one, however. Incorporating AI within your processes can help to remove mundane and repetitive tasks from your physical workforce allowing them to concentrate on more complex and more engaging parts of their work. This could be in the form of a virtual customer service agent able to deal with customer enquiries 24/7, or an expert system to guide your technical staff through non-standard procedures.

Step 4: In flight 

Typically, you’ll have several things to consider when choosing which workloads to move to the cloud, and this doesn’t begin and end with a single trip. There will be a few stop-offs along the way. For a variety of reasons, such as software age, longevity of a workload, or complex data interdependencies, some workloads may never move to the cloud and will remain in a traditional IT environment.

However, many existing workloads are viable candidates for moving to the cloud—or may become so in the future—and, of course, brand-new applications will most likely be created on the cloud using containers and Kubernetes from the start. 

Sustainability

OK, so maybe the flight analogy doesn’t quite align with the concept of sustainability, but by undertaking this particular journey towards cloud migration, you might even be able to give something back to the planet.

While computing power and accessible data storage are essential in today’s business world for achieving efficiencies across a host of functions, they are actually big contributors to the environmental impact that a company has.

When deploying apps and microservices in containers, businesses can benefit from:

• Autoscaling means that resources are not left idling and only the necessary resources are used at any given time. This leads to reduced energy consumption compared to traditional virtual machine setups.
• Scaling testing environments up or down rather than leaving them running constantly, or even schedule them to be turned off when not required.
• Reducing the demand on data centres—among the largest and fastest-growing consumers of natural resources.
• Reducing the overall energy consumption of cloud infrastructure, which has a larger carbon footprint than the entire airline industry.

Summary 

The question, then, is no longer why you should undertake a cloud transformation journey. Instead, you should be asking yourself: under what circumstances should I start my journey, what path should I take and how do I approach it piece by piece.

Selecting the right applications to be your ‘pioneers’ and identifying the best migration or modernisation path for each requires an analysis of workloads, business needs, and technical complexities. It’s not easy. But when done right, it can deliver all the benefits of maximised efficiency, increased agility and greater freedom to innovate that you set out to deliver for your business. 

As always, we’re here to help. We’re experts in complex migrations and are familiar with the plethora of moving parts within a business’ infrastructure. We understand the nuances and our attention to detail is unmatched. If you’re looking for help on your journey, reach out to us below and we’ll help you on your way. 

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