The only constant in the cloud is change
Many organizations are shifting vast portions of their applications and infrastructure to the cloud in pursuit of lower IT costs, greater business agility, improved security, and accelerated corporate growth.
However, when it comes to cloud-based transformation, there is no single path that would take you from “here” to “there.” As those who have already started on this journey might agree, there are a few challenges companies must stay on top of to ensure they are getting the most out of their cloud migration while delivering maximum support to the business, all at the lowest possible cost.
Cloud environments are anything but constant. Failing to fully understand the cloud adoption process and changes it requires may result in a number of issues, such as architecture incompatibility, extra latency and processes delays, security complexity, governance and compliance challenges, legacy application issues and data loss, lack of visibility and control, unused cloud costs, etc.
To help you better develop your own path, let’s look at three major changes in the cloud that once addressed, could help eliminate unnecessary waste of resources.
1. Changes in business requirements
The challenge: This is the type of change most people think of in the context of cloud computing. When you’re competing in fast-changing markets, merely keeping up is essentially the same as falling behind. Enterprises need agility to capitalize on emerging opportunities, respond to evolving competitive pressures, and meet increasing customer demands. To do so, they may migrate additional workloads from on premises into the cloud, adjust their workloads already running in the cloud, deploy new cloud-native workloads, or some combination. The initial cloud migration process was probably a heavy lift, but the business can’t afford for that to be the case on an ongoing basis.
How to keep up: Operationalize cloud migration by becoming a “migration factory” with a single, comprehensive platform that enables you to keep track of what has moved, what will be moved, and everything going on in between across all of your on-premises and hybrid/multi-cloud environments.
2. Changes in workloads
The challenge: Even in the absence of new or different business requirements, your workloads will drift. Increasing demand or growing data volumes, for example, could cause them to outgrow their current configurations. It’s a natural result of business growth—which is good!—but if you don’t make the appropriate adjustments, you could end up with performance problems and/or ballooning costs, which undermine that success.
How to keep up: Keep your workloads rightsized on an ongoing basis with data and analytics to optimize capacity and cost in real time and tune sizing based on your organization’s risk tolerance with “what if” analysis that includes CPU, memory, I/O, and ingress and egress charges.
3. Changes in CSP offerings
The challenge: Cloud service providers (CSPs) are businesses, too, and they’ve got to continually innovate to stay ahead in their own fast-changing market. They are constantly offering new solution, configuration, and pricing options, and there may be thousands of choices you have to navigate. If a new selection becomes available that is a better fit for your needs, you want to know about it—without spending time constantly researching what’s out there.
How to keep up: Employ tools to automate the analysis of CSP offerings and provide recommendations for best-fit configurations based on your requirements and risk tolerances so you can quickly adjust to changes to keep your cloud cost structures at optimum levels.
Manage all the changes in the cloud with Virtana
Here at Virtana we get it: Cloud migration and management can be stressful. But it doesn’t need to be. We can help you to #KnowBeforeYouGo, so you can make the right choices for your organization.
With Virtana Platform, you can manage change across your entire IT on-premises, public cloud, and hybrid cloud infrastructure with precision observability. The combination of AIOps, machine learning, and data-driven analytics enables efficient migration and ongoing performance, capacity, and cost optimization. Request a free trial today.
Eva Karnaukh
