Traditional infrastructure is no longer cutting it. Costs of maintaining multiple data centers are ever increasing. Go-to-market time is slow, and the right amount of resources aren’t available when required. There is an increasing lack of individuals with the appropriate skillsets who are available to work in-house. So what’s gotta give?

Starting in the last 2000’s, “cloud services” became a hot topic as vendors began providing their software “as a service” – meaning, a web application that was supported virtually, and largely managed and configured by the vendor. Over the past 5 years, cloud services has grown to cover not only applications, but also middleware and infrastructure, creating an opportunity for organizations to greatly decrease their IT footprint by migrating resources into cloud environments.

Examining motives for adopting an organizational cloud strategy is pertinent as it can shape the capabilities needed, cloud services model, future state for the IT operating model, and overall budget planning for IT.

Most frequently, businesses are looking to decrease capital expenses and operational costs, while also getting the most out of their investments. Cloud solutions can decrease costs by providing the option of a “pay-as-you-go model” – businesses only pay for resources when they are in use. This flexibility also opens the door for greater elasticity of services, scaling resouces up and down as they are required.

What is driving you to cloud services?

• Business Agility
• Pay-as-you-go (OpEx model verses CapEx)
• Decreased Total cost of Ownership (TCO)
• Standardization Efforts
• Infrastructure Utilization
• Service automation

The key to determining the appropriate cloud service model is to let organizational requirements drive key decisions. Hybrid cloud is frequently picked as the most accommodating model, as it provides the flexibility and ease of public cloud models, but also enables organizations to house confidential data – such as personally identifiable information – in secured private clouds.

It is critical to have visibility into your assets in order to understand where your confidential data lies in order to design a cloud strategy that is best fit for your environment. AIM Technical Services can help organizations map out where sensitive data is housed, rationalize applications and infrastructure to optimize asset management, and develop a cloud migration strategy that will enhance performance while protecting your data.

Most large organizations adopt hybrid cloud services to take advantage of the best of both worlds – cloud and on-premises. Careful planning and design should produce a cloud architecture that can be implemented in a phased approach that will smoothly and efficiently migrate services and systems to cloud platforms, while preventing impact to those remaining on-premises.

An application assessment prior to implementing cloud services is important to dictate application strategy. Application rationalization can provide insight into application overlap across business units, and help direct which applications are better suited for cloud environments. Careful requirements planning will not only optimize application management budgets, but also take performance into consideration (such as tolerance for network latency, data privacy requirements, scalability, etc.)

With the adoption of cloud services and hybrid deployment models, additional complexity can be introduced into IT management. Service automation can enable organizations to deploy consistent governance and policies across both on-premises and in cloud platforms. Additional consideration should be given when picking cloud service providers, as many have already invested in management and automation tools that can be used across your IT environment.

Regulatory requirements must be taken into account when determining which resources, applications and systems will be migrated from on-premises to the cloud. In cases where systems house personally identifiable information (PII) or restricted information, private cloud deployment models can provide organizations greater control over the geographic location where data is stored and governance over the controls around the infrastructure.

To optimize the benefits of cloud services, IT operations should be evaluated for efficiency and areas of improvement. Cloud services can enable organizations to have a decreased go-to-market with new products and services by automating services and incorporating DevOps models.

One of the greatest requirements for cloud services is elastic infrastructure that can be scaled up and down according to demand. By introducing scalability into the environment, organizations can achieve great cost savings by eliminating on-premises infrastructure that is hardly used except during peak times. Methods of scalability include cloud bursting, which “bursts” traffic to cloud resources when on-premises resources reach maximum capacity.

Security is often the greatest concern when evaluating whether to migrate systems and applications into the cloud. How do you enable thorough controls over an off-site environment? How will security monitoring be conducted, and who will be responsible for it? How will incident response be handled when third parties own the assets? These questions must be raised as cloud architectures and services are planned and designed for.

A comprehensive cloud strategy and perspective will drive cloud planning, design, implementation, and optimization phases, ensuring that plans are continuously evaluated and aligned against organizational objectives.

Combined with traditional professional services, we offer existing architecture analysis including cost mapping and risk based services such as benchmarking, risk ID and mitigation planning.

In order to design a cloud environment that can be successfully implemented, careful planning activities are required. Based on your organization’s objectives, your IT environment should be assessed to understand where critical data resides, what types of applications are running, and what infrastructure is currently supporting critical operations.

Current state assessments can determine an organization’s “cloud readiness”, and determine areas that could benefit most from a cloud migration. Cloud readiness all sheds light on high-risk services and assets that could take a specialized migration approach, or would benefit most by staying in-house.