How and why to adopt a cloud strategy?
The adoption of cloud technologies and solutions, the so-called cloud, is a strategy used by organizations to scale the use of IT services based on Internet technologies and improve agility while reducing costs and risks, although not always and in everything. Throughout this article the word cloud should not be understood exclusively as public cloud but as hybrid cloud in a broader concept and discussed in more detail in a previous article.
The cloud helps to quickly provide services with minimal or reasonable initial costs, very convenient for testing workloads, allowing to adapt more quickly to changes in behavior and circumstances in the market.
Hybrid Cloud: A Cloud Strategy
A cloud strategy is more than just an IT strategy. It is a core component of business strategies today. Organizations that do not have a strategy for cloud adoption assume more risk of disruptions in agility, speed, innovation and other aspects of business decision making. Cloud adoption is no longer an option for the future. Today, any organization can access the incredible computing power available through the cloud if they see the need for it in both their strategic and tactical decisions.
Today's companies are using cloud computing to both expand into new industries and improve the customer experience as well as their products and services. And at the same time they can achieve cost savings on certain legacy systems that are old and difficult to maintain due to technology, knowledge, etc.
An additional value of cloud adoption is the ease of collaboration it enables between teams in multiple geographic locations because of the simple and standard telecommunications connection technologies.
The cloud also makes it possible, in many cases, for companies to decrease the time from decision to implementation by enabling the ability to experiment, learn and fail fast without large investments. In addition, adopting a good cloud strategy (and here is what is relevant and where Integra can help) allows organizations to migrate data, applications and workloads efficiently.
What is cloud migration and what does it entail?
Migrating to the cloud is the step organizations take once they decide to execute their "to the cloud" strategy. For some, this means relocating existing applications and data from local locations to the cloud, for others it simply involves creating new services directly in the cloud. It should be noted that cloud assets can and often must also be integrated with non-cloud IT assets on-premises, which in turn may or may not be using cloud technologies. This is because it does not always make sense to approach it as an all-or-nothing proposition, as in most cases the balance is the most prudent and logical solution.
When migrating to the cloud, organizations can create a hybrid cloud environment using both public and private cloud services. Using multiple cloud options is a common method for customers to deploy some of their services through the public cloud and others through a private cloud.
Benefits of having a cloud strategy
- Scalability: Investments in data center infrastructure and servers can be optimized using the cloud to maximize scalability.
- Cost-Effectiveness: The cloud allows customers to pay only for the capacity needed at any given time and scale on demand when needed. Capacity in on-premise data centers, known as "OnPremise," requires anticipation of needs and deployment of infrastructure before use begins.
- Security: Clouds are typically secure environments that comply with industry standards and applicable government regulations. They are protected through security solutions and tools, best practices and policies that cloud providers update as needed on a regular basis and at scale.
- Backup and recovery: Cloud providers offer simple and effective backup and recovery solutions to protect data migrated to the cloud. Often, data can be migrated to services that are widely available geographically, reducing the chances of data loss in the event of an anomaly. But beware, not all solutions, neither IaaS nor SaaS, are automatically "protected" by backup-restore systems that allow us to recover key data in the event of application failures or user errors. In other words, we must adopt and/or maintain and even enhance our backup and recovery (B/R) policies using technologies such as Veeam or IBM, in which Integra is a specialist.
- Accelerated adoption: migrating applications to the cloud allows customers to adopt new technologies faster, while enabling affordable and timely technology adoption in response to rapidly changing and demanding business opportunities.
- Dashboards: Cloud dashboards provide real-time statistics and active analytics, improving the efficiency of cloud strategies.
In short, by migrating certain workloads to the cloud, organizations can improve operational performance and agility, workload flexibility, scalability and security. Reasons enough to contact us and let us help you make the technological leap your organization needs.
