Seven Keys To Designing A Successful Cloud Strategy

Cloud is the basis of digital infrastructures necessary to achieve business agility to adapt to business requirements in terms of continuity, cost control, flexibility and the ability to scale and de-scale. 

These characteristics of the model are essential to articulate an IT model that supports their organizations’ transformation strategies and creates a digital offer to generate value. However, from the first moment a company considers a migration to the cloud, it is essential to consider a series of factors and necessary steps that are decisive for successfully designing a cloud strategy.

Align The Project With The Objectives of The Company

In general, for any company, its cloud projects must be integrated into a complete cloud strategy in which it does not matter where its workloads operate, whether in a private, hybrid or public cloud. In addition, this cloud roadmap must also be part of the long-term transformation plan for applications, business processes and the IT environment, which must always be aligned with business objectives. The IT team must not be alone but must work with the rest of the units and management, and this will ensure the company’s commitment to the cloud and migration strategy.

To design it, one must assess the IT environment and how the migration may impact the technology organization and business units and consider the technology landscape since many systems communicate. In this process, it is necessary to locate the company’s weak points that will have to be improved, analyze the current business model and identify where it wants to evolve.

Invest in Training

It is convenient for the organization’s IT team, to acquire technical skills on the cloud to know the path that the company is going to follow, even if it finally delegates the deployment and management to a provider of cloud services which has the experience, the resources and skills necessary to carry out this type of deployment. The collaboration between both teams will benefit the project’s development.

Plan and Prepare For Migration

The conclusions drawn from the first phase will serve as the basis for making the decision on which cloud computing infrastructure and which partner are the most suitable, where added value can be obtained quickly, which services should initially be migrated to the cloud, and also if it is worth It’s unfortunate that some workloads remain outside of the cloud environment.

It is also the time to plan the stages of the migration, establish the basic requirements, and determine the resources and execution times. In addition, the project must be documented through a detailed migration plan that defines the architecture, operating model and tools to be used, taking into account factors such as the movement of workloads and interfaces, the integration with other systems, accessibility and operation of migrated environments.

With the advice of the cloud service provider, the migration route is designed, generating the automation that will make it possible to be much more agile in the execution of the initiative, and the migration will proceed.

Consider Security From The Beginning of The Project.

Security in the cloud is one of the elements that must be considered from the conception of the project, a phase in which it is analyzed, for example, how the client has articulated its strategy and security systems, identifying where the security loads are located. Critical jobs and what methods they interoperate with, their degree of Internet exposure, or their regulatory compliance needs, depending on their business, industry, and the size of their IT team.

Therefore, it will be necessary to define which cloud security elements will be used in the deployment and which will determine the final cybersecurity posture of the company and its security system. Traffic encryption rules and mechanisms will also be established, and special attention will be paid to configurations.

Establish Metrics

The benefits of moving systems to the cloud are perceived once the migration is complete, especially in terms of performance, flexibility, costs and scalability. Still, it is always convenient to establish metrics that allow comparing the previous state with the new IT scenario and, simultaneously, set new parameters that facilitate the monitoring of evolution so that the infrastructure is continually optimized and aligned with the company’s objectives and strategy.

Always Seek Economic And Technical Efficiency.

The needs of companies vary, depending on the changes in the market or the economic situation. For this reason, it is recommended that cost optimization and infrastructure control initiatives be implemented to achieve, at the same time, greater technical efficiency.

Methodologies such as FinOps allow adequate financial management of the cloud through collaboration between the company’s different departments to make spending decisions based on data and make the most of the potential of the IT infrastructure. This is achieved, for example, by resizing the infrastructure. Hence, there is no overuse or underutilized equipment, reviewing the storage to avoid unnecessary costs or taking advantage of the savings programs of the different cloud providers.

Drive Innovation

Once the company has evolved to the cloud, the new architecture allows it to go a step further and has more capacity to innovate, integrating it with unique services based on Big Data technologies, the Internet of Things, Machine Learning or Artificial Intelligence.