The cloud computing revolution is well underway. Businesses across industries and of all sizes are rapidly adopting cloud services and infrastructure to achieve greater agility, scalability, and cost savings. This migration represents a major shift in how companies think about IT resources and assets.
Why Companies Are Embracing the Cloud
There are several compelling reasons why enterprises today are embracing the cloud:
Reduced capital expenses
One of the biggest advantages of the cloud is that it eliminates the need for large capital expenditures on hardware and data centres. Rather than investing heavily in on-premise IT infrastructure, companies can consume computing resources on an as-needed basis and pay only for what they use. This pay-as-you-go pricing model translates to significant cost savings.
Improved Scalability
Cloud platforms allow companies to easily scale up or down to meet demands. Rather than having to predict future infrastructure needs and procure sufficient hardware, firms can dynamically adjust their cloud usage. This elasticity enables aligning IT costs more closely with actual business needs.
Faster Deployment
Provisioning new servers and infrastructure traditionally took weeks or months in on-premise environments. With the cloud, new resources can be spun up in minutes or hours. This accelerated deployment speeds up development cycles and time-to-market for new products and features.
Increased Agility
The nimbleness of the cloud gives companies more flexibility to experiment, test new ideas, and pivot quickly. Organisations can adopt modern IT methodologies like DevOps more easily in the cloud to achieve continuous delivery and deployment.
Enhanced Collaboration
Cloud platforms make it simpler for teams and employees to access information and collaborate productively from anywhere. Features like file sharing and productivity apps support a more mobile workforce.
Disaster Recovery
Backing up data and systems to the cloud safeguards against localised disasters and outages. Companies can readily failover to cloud-based disaster recovery sites to ensure business continuity.
Top cloud providers
Several technology giants dominate the public cloud market, including:
- Amazon Web Services (AWS): The longtime market leader offers a full range of IaaS and PaaS services, including computing, storage, networking, databases, analytics, machine learning, and more. AWS has data centres worldwide.
- Microsoft Azure: Azure is rapidly gaining market share with its IaaS and PaaS offerings. Microsoft has made Azure integral to much of its software and services.
- Google Cloud Platform (GCP): GCP provides a highly scalable IaaS platform plus AI tools, big data analytics, and more. Companies can leverage Google’s advanced technology.
- IBM Cloud: IBM Cloud focuses on enterprise needs, including hybrid cloud deployments, AI, and security. IBM offers consulting and managed services.
- Oracle Cloud: Oracle Cloud tailors to long-time Oracle application customers with cloud versions of Oracle software plus IaaS and PaaS.
Multi-cloud adoption is rising.
Rather than relying on a single provider, many firms adopt multi-cloud or hybrid cloud strategies combining different vendors. This avoids vendor lock-in and allows matching specific apps and workloads to the best platform.
Cloud migration planning
Migrating business systems and data to the cloud is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. Careful planning helps companies determine the best cloud model and strategy for their unique needs.
Assess Readiness
Firms should take stock of their existing IT infrastructure and analytics to identify dependencies, compatibilities, security needs, and more. This assessment stage provides critical insights for planning.
Choose Approach
There are several options for migrating to the cloud:
- Rehosting (“lift and shift”): relocating apps and data unchanged into cloud infrastructure
- Replatforming: making some optimisations to leverage cloud capabilities
- Refactoring or re-architecting: more extensive changes to exploit cloud attributes
- Retire: decommission unneeded apps and infrastructure.
The optimal approach depends on many factors, including app architectures, timelines, budgets, and more.
Prioritise Workloads
Not all apps and workloads may be suitable for initial cloud migration. Companies should prioritise apps and data that can deliver quick business value in the cloud while reserving more complex migrations for later phases.
Devise Timeline
The migration timeline should balance business needs, complexity, resources required, and other considerations. Most adopters target incremental phased migrations vs. a big bang approach to minimise disruptions.
Choose Target Architecture
The cloud allows companies to rethink their target architecture and deployment patterns. Key decision areas include:
- IaaS vs. PaaS vs. SaaS: infrastructure, platform, or software as a service
- Public vs. private cloud
- Multi-vs. hybrid cloud
- Stateless vs. stateful apps
- Containers and orchestration
- Serverless computing
- Microservices
- Data tiering
Mapping out the desired cloud architecture early aids migration.
Assess Options
The cloud platform decision hinges on several factors:
- Required services, features, and tools
- Geographic availability and reach
- Compliance and data residency restrictions
- Vendor track record and roadmap
- Pricing and TCO
- Migration support is offered.
Firms should evaluate leading providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP based on these criteria.
Validate Financials
Companies should forecast and validate the business case for cloud migration, accounting for all costs and expected savings. This helps secure buy-in from executives and stakeholders.
Build internal skills.
Any knowledge gaps in cloud technologies and operations should be identified early. Companies can then ramp up skills through hiring, training, and partnerships.
Executing migrations methodically
The actual process of migrating to the cloud should be executed methodically, following best practices:
Set up a landing zone.
The cloud landing zone provides a baseline environment and foundation to migrate into. It implements initial security, compliance, data protection, monitoring, and other standard features.
Establish Governance
A cloud governance model codifies policies, procedures, roles, and responsibilities required to properly operate in the cloud. Governance spans cost management, security, compliance, and more.
Modernise Applications
Legacy apps may need to be re-architected using cloud-native features like microservices and containerization to realise the full benefits of the cloud. This application modernization is often done incrementally.
Automate Processes
Automating manual processes like infrastructure provisioning, deployment, and patching speeds them up dramatically. Automation and orchestration become critical in the cloud.
Refactor Databases
Monolithic databases can be broken down into microservices more suited for cloud infrastructure. Databases also often need refactoring to work with clusters, caching, sharding, and replication in the cloud.
Embrace IaC
Infrastructure as code (IaC) lets engineers configure cloud infrastructure through machine-readable definition files rather than manual processes. This improves consistency and enables automation.
Implement CI/CD
Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) optimise the development lifecycle for rapid, frequent releases. CI/CD is native to the cloud.
Monitor Closely
Cloud environments need robust monitoring across servers, apps, user activities, costs, performance, security, and more. This provides visibility and alerts for cloud operational health.
Control Costs
Unused resources and waste can quickly drive up public cloud costs. Cost management techniques like right-sizing instances, auto-scaling, reserved instances, and automation help control expenses.
Realising cloud benefits
Once in the cloud, companies can realise significant business gains:
Increased Efficiency
Cloud infrastructure is highly automated and efficient compared to on-premises servers and data centres. IT teams can manage much larger environments.
Faster Innovation
The cloud’s scalability, flexibility, and automation foster rapid experimentation, testing, and iteration to deliver features and products to market faster.
Improved Uptime
High availability and redundancy mechanisms in the cloud minimise downtime risks. Apps can stay up through outages and disasters.
Enhanced Collaboration
Cloud file sharing and productivity tools support collaboration across global teams and partners. Co-development is easier at scale.
Reduced Costs
For most companies, the cloud significantly reduces overall infrastructure and IT delivery costs over the long term through optimisation and pay-per-use economics.
Greater Security
Hyperscale cloud providers invest billions in security and employ top experts. For many firms, cloud security exceeds on-premise defences.
Scalability on demand
Usage spikes and growth pose no issue in the cloud. Additional resources are spun up instantly when needed to handle peaks transparently.
Business Agility
The cloud gives companies the agility to enter new markets, spin up new business models, and meet evolving customer needs faster than ever.
Improved disaster recovery
Vital systems replicate across multiple data centres and regions, providing resilience. Apps can fail quickly in a disaster.
Example cloud migrations
Many major enterprises have undertaken successful large-scale cloud migrations.
- Adobe: The software company migrated all its popular creative applications, including Photoshop and Acrobat, to AWS. This enabled scalability to support spikes of hundreds of thousands of concurrent users.
- GE Oil & Gas: GE migrated its sensors and industrial data to AWS to better collect, analyse, and take action on vast amounts of field data. This improved the uptime and output of drilling equipment.
- McDonald’s – McDonald’s piloted migrating its point-of-sale systems to Google Cloud before expanding to tens of thousands of locations. The cloud-enabled faster updates and scalability.
- Netflix, the streaming leader, migrated fully to the AWS cloud infrastructure years ago. This helped Netflix nimbly scale to over 200 million subscribers.
- Western Union: The payments firm modernised its applications in the AWS cloud to simplify operations across its global platform.
Closing Recommendations
Migrating major business systems and data to the cloud is a complex undertaking requiring thoughtful planning and execution. Following best practices helps companies transition smoothly while unlocking the cloud’s many benefits:
- Develop a solid business case for cloud adoption aligned with strategic goals.
- Audit existing infrastructure and apps to devise the optimal migration approach.
- Assess leading cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP carefully to pick the best platform.
- Build a detailed migration roadmap and timeline to minimise risk and disruption.
- Invest in re-architecting and modernising applications for cloud portability.
- Automate processes and embrace infrastructure as code for consistency and speed.
- Refactor databases for horizontal scalability, resilience, and performance.
- Implement robust governance, security, compliance, and cost controls.
- Leverage cloud experts and managed services to fill any knowledge gaps.
With the right strategy and execution, companies can successfully migrate to the cloud and enable transformation towards a more nimble, scalable, and cost-effective IT environment. The cloud migration journey allows enterprises to innovate faster and outpace competitors.