Thinking of moving to the cloud?

Have you been contemplating making the shift from hosting and managing your infrastructure on-premise to using hosting your managed web services in the cloud? You’re not alone and the statistics prove it.

According to the Cisco Global Cloud Index:

• More than 94% of all workloads will be handled on the cloud by 2021
• Over 90% of all companies have infrastructure already in the cloud
• The cloud infrastructure market is expected to hit nearly $500 billion by 2023, up from $229 billion since 2019

It’s clear that the future of infrastructure rests within the cloud, but as with anything new, there are crucial elements you need to think about when considering this migration.

In today’s blog, we’ll break down the process and cover those elements to consider before embarking on your on-premise to cloud migration journey. Follow along as we cover:

• The benefits of the cloud
• How to perform a successful migration
• Significant tips and takeaways

Benefits of the cloud

There’s an extensive range of benefits when moving to the cloud. Some of these extras depend on your specific business, but here’s a look at what we’re seeing with our clients.

Agility

The number one reason to move to the cloud is, without a doubt, the agility it affords your organization.

This gives you the power to quickly spin up global resources as you need them, all within the span of a couple of minutes. You can experiment, innovate, and move quickly. Nearly everything is possible when working with a managed web infrastructure.

Cost-savings

Instead of investing in datacenters and hardware, you can maintain flexibility with resources that can be scaled up or down depending on your business needs. A major takeaway here is the opportunity to focus your spending on the things that add value to your business – no more distractions from managing infrastructure.

Security

With the cloud, you can take advantage of economies of scale. Amazon invests an extraordinary amount of resources into cyber security, so take advantage of their investments and stay ahead of attacks. Amazon not only provides communication around ongoing issues, they offer peace of mind; the knowledge that your infrastructure is secure. (Assuming you follow their well-documented best practices, of course.)

Monitoring and up-time

It’s simple to set up monitoring around your infrastructure. Stay ahead of issues with notifications and set up your infrastructure to scale based on traffic.

When Moving from On-Prem to Cloud

What if your infrastructure is mostly hosted on-premise, how do you start migrating to the cloud?

Here are some high priority items to consider before migrating.

Controlling costs

With the massive number of services being offered by cloud providers, it is easy to lose track of which services are enabled and utilized from a cost perspective. It’s important to setup proper tracking and user permissions to stay on top of your infrastructure in the cloud.

Learning curve

Like anything new, there’s a learning curve. Your background and experience level will influence the difficulty to ramp-up, but the good news is that there are some excellent resources available.

Take your time

Proper migrations take proper preparation and planning. Stage your migration and start shifting non-essential infrastructure until you get your bearings with your hosting provider. 

Infrastructure as code

Some cloud providers, like Amazon, offer creating and managing your infrastructure in code via template files. I always recommend taking this approach as it makes reproducing and managing the stack much simpler. Updates are version controlled and monitored.

Some migration tips and final advice

In my experience, to reiterate my point above, the success of your migration will depend on the amount of planning and preparation you and your team put in.

• Start small and move non-essential infrastructure in a hybrid approach combining your existing on-premise infrastructure with your cloud infrastructure.
• Invest in training and professional development within your team.
• Practice disaster scenarios to mitigate risks and ensure proper backups and monitoring are setups.

The investment in migrating from on-premise does pay out and really empowers your development and engineering teams to move fast and innovate. Focus on the things delivering real business value and let cloud providers handle the commonalities across organizations from an infrastructure perspective.

If you’re still uneasy about how or when to move forward, Content Bloom is currently offering a free consultation report for businesses in need of an infrastructure strategy plan, reach out for additional information.