Cloud computing has become an important competitive requirement for today’s business information systems. From agility and scalability to cost savings and security, its benefits are undeniable. In 2019, Microsoft has established Azure public cloud datacenters in South Africa and have also announced new cloud regions for the UAE, Norway, Germany, and Switzerland. Many enterprises that operate in these regions are planning to quickly begin taking advantage of these regionally compliant, low-latency compute resources.

Read more: To dash to the cloud, stash in the cloud

What do you need to understand to ensure that your transition to the cloud is quick and free of disruption?

Why is the cloud important?

Businesses are now tasked with evolving at faster rates than ever before. Keeping up with customer preferences is a hefty challenge requiring in-depth iteration and care. Cloud technology is an ideal solution to these changing dynamics because it enables a robust and quick framework to reduce the time between a new idea and a production feature. Cloud providers and open-source technologies are teaming up to provide these services in a simplified and maintainable manner to seamlessly enhance your current IT capabilities.

Hybrid cloud can ease your migration

A hybrid cloud model combines on-premises and on-cloud features to give you the best of both worlds so you can continuously adapt your business to cloud computing while also optimizing your on-premises investments. Depending on the size of your business’s data, cloud migrations can take a considerable amount of time, which can interfere with your everyday business processes. Through a hybrid configuration, you can shift your data to the cloud in properly planned phases without disrupting your IT architecture or business operations.

You can also address any apprehensions or concerns that you might have about cloud security through hybrid cloud by keeping sensitive information and proprietary applications on your on-site servers and transitioning all your other data to the cloud.

It’s also possible to use a hybrid cloud setup for bursting through the innovative use of containerization for existing application workloads without much refactoring. In this scenario, your existing on-premises infrastructure takes care of your normal compute workload, but your cloud implementation handles any excess volume during peak hours. In this way you maximize the return on your on-premises investment and only pay for the cloud resources that you use when demand spikes.

An experienced cloud implementation partner is essential

Cloud implementations mostly fail because companies think that their IT teams are capable of creating and executing a comprehensive, end-to-end cloud implementation plan, even though they have never done it before. A smarter way of utilizing your resources, time, and money is hiring an experienced cloud implementation partner who is well-equipped with best practices and has a proper understanding of relevant compliance and security issues to ensure a smooth migration to the cloud. If you choose wisely, you might be lucky enough to find a cloud implementation partner who provides long-term support, allowing you to fully leverage your cloud infrastructure’s productivity-enhancing capabilities.

Productivity and insights for business

In our connected world, there is an abundance of information and we can reach out to people with unprecedented ease. Business users now look for the same user experience within the workplace so that they can find and consume information easily and where colleagues are just a click or tap away. Cloud-based productivity tools like Microsoft Office 365 and Google G Suite provide collaboration tools for the network age that enable businesses to respond better to their customers and their demands, translating collaboration into competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Making sense of the data generated by transaction systems is the other competitive advantage that all businesses need and one where cloud vendors and platforms have commoditized technologies that would require huge capital investment to institute in-house. Data lakes, faster data processing tools, and machine learning-based analytical and data query models can be used readily without a steep learning curve. These are indispensable tools in today’s warp-speed business cycles.

Choose a platform that simplifies integration and extension

Somehow, with much difficulty, you might get through the whole planning and migration process yourself, only to realize that the cloud platform you have chosen isn’t the best fit for your specific business applications. This is why choosing the right cloud platform that fits your business needs can be a challenging task.

Without proper research, you might not know about assessment tools offered by cloud platforms like Azure that enable you to easily evaluate your applications for the cloud. Cloud platforms now also come with built-in extensions like Azure’s Cortana Intelligence Suite that provide actionable insights to improve your productivity on the cloud.

Cloud orchestration

The cloud makes it exceedingly simple to select technologies and services from a catalog of hundreds of native services and marketplace offerings with just a few mouse clicks, from provisioning a hefty server to setting up a Big Data platform. However, it does require a certain level of operational maturity in an organization to follow practices that promote innovation, not stifle access to technologies for fear of overspending during evaluations, and monitor their cloud usage through the lens of their business objectives so that cloud initiatives deliver the promise of using modern technology without tremendous capital investment.

Conclusion

You might be rushing to migrate to the cloud to stay ahead of your competition, but without sound strategy, a carefully prepared plan, and an ideal implementation partner, your cloud journey might face numerous roadblocks. Plan your cloud journey with Visionet’s cloud experts who have years of experience, knowledge, and expertise in cloud migration. Schedule a meeting today.