For some companies, however, transitioning to cloud-based services and business solutions is not a straightforward thing. It is even worse when it involves moving the consumer-facing business solutions to multiple cloud services. Still, it is the best business move you can make, and here are the four things you need to know about making that leap.
1. Multi-Cloud Is the Way to Go
Until very recently, businesses relied on a single service for all their cloud computing needs. Many cloud service providers were then offering a wide range of services that cover business needs, so this quickly became the norm. Today, sticking with a single service provider proves to be inefficient in most cases. There are service providers that excel in providing large storage buckets, high-availability computing instances, and even dedicated serverless database services.
2. Think Integration Early
Using multiple cloud services and solutions is the way to go but you need to think about how to best integrate them as part of your migration process. Adding that integration component into your cloud migration planning process is a must. There are multiple ways to tackle this issue too. For example, you can use a SaaS API to connect multiple services and standardize the commands used to manage them. This lets developers and administrators focus more on services and applications rather than infrastructure management.
3. Don’t Forget Cost Management!
Cloud services are cheap. Well, affordable. When you look at the granularity of cloud service cost structure, it is easy to think that you will end up with just a few bucks in cloud charges. That is seldom the case if you don’t start managing your cloud computing costs from the start. The small charges here and there quickly add up. An abandoned computing instance still needs to be paid for as long as you have the cloud resources allocated. Don’t make the mistake of not having cost visibility being an integral part of the migration and cloud management process.
4. Match Infrastructure with Services
Lastly, make sure you develop a multi-cloud infrastructure that matches your needs right now, not needs you might have in the future. You need to be objective when looking at your existing business apps and the refactoring of those solutions before thinking about infrastructure design. Similar to costs, it is easy to over-allocate cloud resources. After all, having four extra computing cores won’t hurt, right? That’s not entirely true. The inefficient allocation of resources prevents services from being optimized for performance, and that has serious implications in the long run. Will the cloud migration process be challenging? Even today, migrating to the cloud is still a challenge. With multi-cloud becoming more common, the costs of cloud services going down significantly, and the wealth of tools you can use to help guide and manage the process, you will have no problem creating a migration plan that will anticipate and solve those problems.
