Digitally-aware organizations will benefit from hyper-cloud technologies that accelerate innovation, minimal capital investment and make it easy to scale common use cases like advanced analytics, B2B front door integration, and digital systems.
Early cloud adopters can use native cloud architecture to help them manage the tradeoff between reduced migration costs, lower operating expenses, faster time-to-market, and platform-agnostic Containers. This allows them to leapfrog digitally while reducing up to 20% to 30% of the initial investment. These companies want to combine the strengths of several clouds, solving complex or multiple uses cases.
Many enterprises with monolithic legacy architectures are looking to the cloud as a competitive advantage or necessity have concerns about a smooth transition with a good cloud presence. A few choices are available when looking at the application portfolio and data pipes.
* Retire applications at the end-of-life stage or with cheaper alternatives
* Maintain on-premise controls to comply with legal mandates, golden recording purposes, monolithic architecture, and regulatory reasons.
* Rehost those applications that require extensive code rework to slowly refactor them into the cloud and decouple from other systems.
* Consider hybrid deployment for legacy applications that are too complex to refactor and have a software-as-a-service option available.
* Reimagine business process to make cloud software architecture more effective and transform functional components into microservices.
There are some great tips to guide you avoid costly overruns and missed opportunities when migrating to the cloud.
* Containers are light application hosting environments that share a kernel of the host OS system. This contrasts to virtual machines (VMs) that have their operating systems. Container-based environments can be between 25%- 50% less resource-intensive than VM-based environments. This savings projection will vary depending on legacy infrastructure complexity and other factors.
* A micro-service-oriented architecture may enable fully decentralized and modular architecture. You can break up large applications and create smaller, independent microservices with API access that are portable and reusable.
* Containerization and refactoring applications can elegantly reduce the total cost of ownership, modernize the application stack, and help to manage it.
* You can determine your cost better by using APIs and having a structure of subscriptions, role-based access control, and a tagging policy.
* Applications can be loosely coupled microservices or serverless functions that span multiple on-premises or cloud environments.
* Organizations must have “observability” to analyze logs and detect runaway costs, nonoptimal storage/compute configurations, and refactoring opportunities.
* In addition to the security controls in Azure, an organization’s security certification and gaps mitigation must be performed. An organization’s security should be assessed using domain-specific data controls in multi-cloud environments.
* Access to multiple data sources, so-called “dark information,” must be centrally managed with a plan to avoid uncontrolled proliferation and overhead from managing records, cost, and uncertain return.
As noted in a Unisys Report, “The migration factories project approach breaks down migration into waves or phases where servers, databases, and other components of a group can be moved onto the cloud.” You can create templates and design patterns that allow you to move data simultaneously through multiple squads (e.g., IoT streaming or clinical ontologies),
An ongoing cloud management solution is a key component of successful transformation. This can give insight into utilization, reduce runaway costs, provide security controls, and be a force multiplier to create innovative products.
