Best practices for Cloud Migration at scale: the ‘muscle’ of businesses worldwide

For Enterprises of today and tomorrow, the road to success has been carved with an inevitable pitstop and that is – at the Cloud. Keeping up this pace of progress has become elemental to earn the competitive edge in the COVID era and the biggest risk an enterprise could take would be to slow down their digital journey to a crawl. However, while making this transition, many service providers fail to critically map and align cloud journeys to their business strategies, and current priorities, leading to a sore failure of cloud migration. Moreover, if not adopted in the right manner, compliance risks could complicate issues further.

So, what are the best practices and potential risks while adopting cloud at scale?

Making the Cloud a bright success: The best practices

According to a recent report, by 2024, 40% of organizations will implement dedicated cloud services either on-premises or in a service provider facility. In this hyper-growth phase of cloud migration, the best solutions are those which can time and again help build resilient organizations that can scale up and down without compromising security or customer experience. Here are five practices that has guaranteed smooth cloud adoption:

o Adopt a cloud-native, everything-as-cloud approach

To achieve continuous, repeatable success with cloud adoption, enterprises must explore using templates and machine-readable files to build a virtual data center on demand. The transition becomes much easier when deploying to the cloud is done using automated, pre-designed templates which already contains the enterprise’s security, compliance, and deployment opinions. As always, automation eliminates human error and facilitated secure infrastructure deployment.

o Select the right workload

On your journey to get a buy-in from organizations, it is crucial that the workload application chosen contributes to the success of the business. There is greater success when the proposed workload carries both, internally and externally recognizable branding, considerably suffers from scale, cost, or agility which cloud computing can help overcome, and lastly, possess some cloud-native characteristics already, with a low level of technical complexity.

o Build an internal powerhouse of thinkers

As the application’s cloud journey matures, enterprises must invest in building a team of in-house high performers along with the right cloud consulting partner to drive cloud adoption throughout the organization. With a clear strategy in place, this team can help build a process and culture that compliments cloud adoption.

o Start with a cloud foundation that scales

Smart organizations opt to have a virtual data center in the cloud. This ensures two things; One, it ensures a ready-to-go compliance, governance and operational readiness and two, reduces human error by turning to automation. This virtual data center will form a foundation for migrating to the cloud with scale.

o Go faster with the right foundation

Often, a cloud platform that can help moving to the public cloud at scale has proven to be the best choice. Exploring cloud platforms with a firm foundation which is already well-trusted by some of the world’s largest, and most security-conscious companies would be a good place to start. Along with reliability, an effective cloud platform usually includes enterprise-grade templates which can get you started instantly.

Lightning strikes: The risks of ad-hoc cloud use

While cloud success at scale has positively transformed and redefined ways of working globally, cloud computing collates all the resources needed to develop, test, and launch new applications and services – which are only a few clicks away. For large enterprises, especially those in highly regulated industries, this is precisely what introduces the biggest risks. To maintain a check on cloud consumption and eliminate unwanted chaos, proper operational controls and processes can ring-fence enterprises from security and compliance issues, here are some risks of ad-hoc cloud use:

o Shadow IT: Moving away from central IT can compromise the enterprise’s security, and pose compliance issues
o Unsecured data: Often, cloud containers could be wrongly labeled, and mislabeled storage represents a data-leak
o Technical debt: A strategic plan needs to steer the organization’s cloud transition. Further, applications, security configurations and services need to be reworked to avoid any technical debts.

Today, service providers know that they must transform and progress digitally to create the heightened experiences that their customers expect. Hence, it is one thing to migrate a single application to the cloud, but an entirely different game to achieve cloud at scale. With digital experiences and a ‘new-age of work’ at centerstage, cloud migration will empower service providers to reimagine digital experiences, adopt cloud at scale and build a culture of velocity. Now is the right time to grow bigger and faster with cloud.