Over the past ten years we’ve learned quite a bit about cloud migration and achieving success across various platforms. Over that time, a lot has changed, and ongoing innovations continue to provide new opportunities for the enterprise. Here, we’re recapping the four most important lessons we’ve learned for new cloud users.
1. Close the knowledge gap
With the rate of innovation in the cloud, the knowledge gap is wider than ever, but that innovation has reduced complexity in many ways. To maximize these innovations, businesses must incentivize employees to continue developing new skills.
Certifications and a desire to continue learning and earning credentials are the traits businesses want in their IT employees. Fostering a company culture that encourages experimentation, growth, and embracing new challenges creates an environment that helps employees develop to the next level.
At 2nd Watch, we create a ladder of success that challenges associates to move from intermediate to advanced capabilities. We foster employees’ natural inclinations and curiosities to build on their passions. Exposing people to new opportunities is a great way to invest in their aptitudes and backgrounds to evolve with the company. One way to do this is by setting up a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE), a multi-stakeholder group that includes subject matter experts from various areas of the business. With the multi-skilled group, the collective become the subject matter experts in cloud services and solutions. By setting up a CCOE, silos are eliminated and teams work together in an iterative fashion to promote the cloud as a transformative tool.
2. Assemble the right solutions
Cloud is not always cheaper. If you migrate to the cloud without mapping to the right solutions, you risk increasing cost. For example, if you come from a monolithic architectural environment, it can be tempting to try and recreate that architecture in the cloud.
But, different than your traditional on-prem environment, many resources in the cloud do not require a persistent state. You have the freedom to allow jobs like big data and ETL (extract, transform and load) to run just once a day, rather than 24 hours a day. If you need it for an hour, spin it up for the hour, access your data in your cloud provider’s storage area, then turn it off to minimize usage and costs.
You can also perform simple tweaks to your architecture to improve performance. We recommend exploring containerization and serverless models to implement automation where possible. New cloud users should adapt to the new environment to allow for future use cases, provision resources for future states, and use assets based on scalability. Cloud allows you to map solutions to scale. Partners like 2nd Watch help create a roadmap based on forecasting from current usage.
3. Combine services based on desired outcomes
There is a plethora of cloud service options available, and the way you use them should be driven by the outcomes you want. Are you looking to upgrade? Lift and shift? Advance the business forward? Once you have a clear outcome defined, you can begin your cloud journey with that goal in mind and start planning how best to use each cloud service.
4. Take an active role in the shared responsibility model
In traditional IT environments, security falls solely on the company, but as a cloud user, the model is significantly different. Many cloud service providers utilize a shared security responsibility model where both the cloud provider and the user take ownership over different areas of security.
Often times, cloud providers can offer more security than your traditional datacenter environment ever could. For example, you are not even permitted to see your cloud provider’s data center. Their locations are not known to the public, nor is where your customer data resides known to the datacenter employees.
Although your cloud provider handles much of the heavy lifting, it’s your responsibility to architect your applications correctly. You need to ensure your data is being put into the appropriate areas with the proper roles and responsibilities for access.
Are you ready to explore your options in the cloud? Contact 2nd Watch to learn more about migration, cloud enabled automation, and our multi-layered approach to security.
-Ian Willoughby, Chief Architect and Skip Barry, Executive Cloud Enablement Director
