Why Cloud Adoption...What are the necessary steps needed to migrate onto cloud

Cloud services offered by different cloud providers have grown exponentially in recent years. Cloud adoption work for start-ups, small & medium enterprises (SMEs) as well as large enterprises. Cloud adoption has increasingly seen to benefit enterprises across business sectors - be it banking, financial services, insurance, health care, manufacturing, automotive, travel & leisure, social media, gaming, etc. Is it a norm for every business to migrate to cloud..?

Cloud adoption reduces the overhead to manage & maintain hardware + pay for software maintenance & upgrade regularly for enterprise customers and let them focus on their core business functionality. That's why cloud adoption has seen an exponentially increasing trend over the last decade or so, and more so embracing in the years to come...a key driver for cloud adoption is moving from Cap-Ex to Op-Ex model;

Few major players / providers in the industry are Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM etc...Gartner reports distributed cloud  as one of the key trends for 2021. However, each business has its' choice to compare costs & decide whichever option meets their need best. Cloud, has now evolved as an utility service, from the days of distributed, grid & cluster computing.

Cloud adoption benefits cost of maintenance and improves flexibility; all customers benefit from new services made available publicly - to experiment, at rapid speed, with pay-per-use option; depending on the business case:

1. customers can choose to avail cloud infrastructure to setup their custom platform & services OR 

2. choose to only deploy their services / core logic as a function - with the platform & infrastructure managed by the cloud provider OR

3. forget about managing infrastructure / application / services - use a cloud software deployed as-is to serve their business

 Pricing options, cost-benefit models, planning to effective manage cost on cloud etc. are detailed in my AWS Pricing blog & 'Cost optimization pillar' section in AWS Architecture pillars blogs.

Cloud adoption requires the changes understood & business impact analyzed - communicated across different stakeholders in the organization; also needs a business drive to successfully implement transformation programs - especially for large enterprises; collect application portfolio data & rationalize into one of 6R strategies: re-host (lift & shift), re-platform, re-factor / re-architect, re-purchase, retire (applications no longer needed) & retain (required applications)

Enterprises with existing on-premise infrastructure & software services need to carefully plan their migration strategy; Cloud migration complexity varies depending on the architecture considerations and flexibility with existing application set; phase-wise migration approach is recommended to build early confidence; among the 6-R strategies, re-factor / re-architect is known to be more complex by experience, while the best approach to optimize enterprise applications;

Thousands of start-ups realize the benefits of cloud & it's implications; cloud platforms provide free & easy access to software developers, students, etc. and teams could realize their ideas via experimentation at an affordable cost;

Cloud adoption is flexible, hundreds of services & options are made available on the cloud, managed by the cloud provider to choose from; depending on the business use case, business consumers need to evaluate the cloud applicability;

• Cloud migration gels well with an agile development approach; experimentation & evaluation of techniques, ideas, performance, etc. is possible sooner - at early stages of migration

• this helps decide the best option - based on actual data / results from experiments;

• helps uncover unknown areas at early stages - reduces risk of program failure at a later stage;

• Large enterprises service variety of applications, thereby customers can choose to evaluate services on multiple cloud provider(s) - best suited for a sub-division within the enterprise;

• "Cloud security" or security of data (data-at-rest & in-transit) needs to be planned & evaluated for businesses to ensure integrity, confidentiality & reliability for their customers

• using static code analysis tools to detect possible software vulnerabilities is a practice to inculcate within the development teams
  

• securing data in filesystems, block storage, databases & object storage - should be encrypted with restricted access

• securing data in transit / between local area / wide area network is equally important to consider

• data backup & archival processes, recovery in case of a failure should be planned aptly to reduce risk of data loss in case of an attack --> my blog on AWS security services covers details related to security services on the Amazon cloud;
  

• Continuous integration & automation (Dev-Ops) is also a vital point to consider for cloud adoption; 

• Cloud providers promote workload automation - to build, test, deploy & monitor automatically with least manual intervention; 

• this helps businesses to create software services, test them quickly, deploy them into production and go-to-market at a quick pace;

• cloud adoptors say - "automate everything", meaning reduce manual intervention - to build your code, application, platform & infrastructure - there by reducing chances of errors; promote interoperability, portability, being platform / cloud provider agnostic;

Similar to agile, cloud adoption may prove to be a change in mindset for large organizations, with different teams, with varying skill levels & work culture; hence important to staff & train employees within an organization - for an effective transition;

Prioritizing the relevant IT skills for recruitment & training is important for large organizations; such a drive helps organizations embrace change & technology innovation;

 In summary, cloud adoption is easier for start-ups to start from scratch; poses an organization change for large enterprises to carefully evaluate options to migrate - considering application portfolio, supportive business streams, migration planning, security, dev-ops & automation, governance & project management aspects as well as skill development aspect within the organization;