The journey to the cloud can be a little nerve-wracking as with any digital transformation journey, but it’s necessary to keep your business afloat in today’s ever-evolving technology landscape. Before you begin, you need to understand why you want to make the move and how it will impact your business. You don’t want to dive headfirst into something you don’t fully understand. You’d be playing a dangerous game that most likely won’t end well.
Today, there are three major public cloud trends that can drive your business outcomes and that are essential to any successful cloud migration.
Three Public Cloud Trends
- Shifting from a physical location to a virtual location.
Every business hires employees differently. For companies who onboard in giant bursts, such as 100-200 employees in a day, it’s a lot of work, especially if they’re handing out laptops. However, a virtual desktop is one API call away. Those new hires can have their desktops provisioned in an hour vs. days. Public cloud is great for those growth spurts. - Making hard things easier.
Looking at cloud in general, we see companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google providing tools and services for machine learning. Most companies don’t have a core set of PHD level Data Scientists, they now have access to services which lower that barrier and allow them to train an existing machine learning model against their data set and get reliable, predictable results out of it. - Rethinking how applications are deployed and run.
For companies migrating to the cloud, many things must happen to get there. One of the first hurdles for traditional infrastructure people is getting over not having access or knowledge of the underlying physical hardware. Now, a lot of that complexity is extracted, but it comes back in other ways and companies must plan to maintain availability and reliability.
Pragmatically, an application is serving a business function that is, hopefully, generating income. Balancing the cost to run the application against its value to the company’s goals is an important part of migrating an application anywhere. It doesn’t necessarily mean throwing away and starting over with new custom-developed and cloud native, serverless applications. It can be that a company needs to automate the way a traditional application is deployed, thinking about how data and compute can be separated but brought together at the right time. Most of the time, it’s learning by doing.
The outcome of these trends sounds great, right? We think so! What would make it better is to have a trusted partner like Involta with the experience to help in both the early planning stages and the implementation and migration stages.
No one should go on their cloud journey alone, so let us help you Get There with our Managed Services.
Our Principal Cloud Automation Engineer, David Bagan, is thrilled to provide insight into what our team is doing today. We are constantly evolving with the ever-changing IT landscape and AWS Managed Account is a next step in our evolution.
What We’ve Been Working On
We’ve developed a couple of Managed Services to help customers get in and maintain their Amazon environment. Specifically for those who have or plan to have a Public Cloud presence, we developed AWS Managed Account, which optimizes customer’s AWS environments; first, by evaluating the existing state, then, using customized and strategic automation to shore up the security and monitoring to enhance day-to-day infrastructure operations for cloud governance, while looking for opportunities to optimize costs along the way.
When you move to an API driven environment like AWS, most of the same considerations as a typical data center still apply, you just carry them out differently. Policies and permissions can get quite complicated, so it’s good to have someone who has experience with them, either building or at least reviewing them along the way for you. As a part of our managed environments, we help build those policies and access permissions. We have pre-canned Roles and Policies that work great, but every company is different and there are always custom needs that are specific to your business because every business is different.
We validate and secure our policies and permissions through automation because everything across the public cloud is an API. Think of it like a giant database that we can query and search through. If we can write rules to evaluate what is going on, we can help automate and secure it without someone having to constantly go in, look something over, and manually check it off the list.
In the end, it’s about Involta coming in and helping the company set up, manage, and keep their entire fleet of applications hanging out in the cloud healthy. People are seeing the need for that kind of ongoing lifecycle and governance of their AWS environments. We’ve got our solutions.
David has years of knowledge built around the cloud and wants to share some words of wisdom with you as you begin your journey to the cloud.
My Recommendation for Getting Started on Your Cloud Journey
The biggest thing I tell people when it comes to their cloud journey is that they just need to start. Get an account, take an application, and deploy it out there. Yes, they will stumble and fail. But those stumbles are where we learn, make note and identify which sports were roughest, and make them better. That goes right along with the Agile software development philosophy; we do something, we measure it, and then we go back and make it better. It works.
People seem to be afraid of the public cloud because it’s new and different, but if they’ve been using a variety of platforms to virtualize their data center for years, most of the same concepts still apply at the “let’s just get going” level. At the end of the day, there’s no one right way to do it. Every company is different and while we all have many of the same challenges, different groups of people are going to solve those challenges in a variety of different ways. It’s about being aware of our business’s goals and taking a pragmatic view to recognize; this works for us.
Stepping into the world of cloud is scary but stepping there with Involta is no big deal. We’ll help you on your cloud journey, no matter if you haven’t started or are already on your way. We’re here to get you there.
