Cloud Approach
Getting started
When an organization first starts to use the public cloud it can be a daunting task. At first, it may seem as the options are obvious and there are a limited choice of services - and this can certainly be the case if your organization’s focus focuses on just infrastructure-as-a-service. All the public clouds seem to offer similar IaaS services with similar capabilities. However, further research reveals that the services are not quite all the same and there is far greater choice than at first appears; the picture can quickly become confusing. It also becomes more and more apparent that the overly-simplistic and over-used lift-and-shift term is rarely, if ever, the case. To achieve the maximum benefit from a migration to cloud, it is also necessary to invest in your applications and workloads to optimize the value that cloud capabilities can offer.
Yet, it also becomes clear that not all of your applications warrant the investment, or that even if you do invest in changing an application, then it might be the case that there may be no return on investment on those application changes - at least not in the expected lifetime of the application.
In the next modernization section we will look at aligning business investment with technology and cloud strategy in more detail, but first, let’s look in little more detail at the very high level view of how to get started with cloud before you have a detailed strategy - in other words, how do you get to build the strategy in the fist place.
Establishing a new cloud environment
When an organization moves its first application to the public cloud from an on-premises environment, it is moving it from a well-established and well-governed, mature environment to an entire greenfield environment. The success of the migration will not simply rely on the specific application, migration but on how well the capabilities of the on-premises environment are matched in the cloud.
The on-premises environment will have been developed over many years and maintained by network administrators, security teams, DBAs, sysadmin, application support, and many others. While a few large-scale cloud migrations may attempt to put all those capabilities in place before migrating any applications, the much more common approach is to start small and to prove the capabilities of the cloud, and then to build a more complete datacenter in the cloud over time, or as a second phase.