While “cloud migration” sometimes feels like a tech-heavy, abstract concept, it’s not. Much of your life has already been migrated to the cloud. Your entertainment is mostly cloud-based, thanks to Netflix and other streaming services. Your calendar, daily to-do list, and most apps on your phone all depend on the cloud. Even the Roomba that vacuums your living room may be sending the locations of your sofa, coffee table, and chairs to a secure cloud server.

Many businesses, however, are hesitant to migrate their digital ops to the cloud. Given the dependability of some legacy, on-premise systems, this makes sense. The mantra, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” applies and has worked well for decades.

But times are changing. The modern, agile business needs the flexibility of cloud-based apps and ops. The cloud enables seamless growth and even enables quick, simple systemic overhauls when necessary. As important, it often costs less—far less—than comparable digital infrastructures.

While some organizations are hesitant to take the leap to the cloud, with the right guidance, it’s less of a “leap” and more of a straightforward, low-risk step. Keep reading for a playbook that helps growing enterprises that are considering cloud migrations.

How Cloud Migration Enables Growth

The cloud’s primary value proposition is that it enables agility and scalability for less money. This paves the way for a quicker, smoother growth curve, one not hampered by frequent stops to make sure your tech is up to snuff.

For example, picture a bank that lets customers apply for loans via an online application. The Fed drops the interest rate, and the number of loan applications starts to skyrocket. If the bank is using on-premise servers, it may struggle to process all of the required documents each customer submits. The speed at which pages get loaded starts to slump, and some customers can’t even finish submitting the necessary documentation.

On the other hand, if the bank uses cloud-based servers, the ecosystem can scale automatically. When the number of applications or documents exceeds a certain threshold, the cloud provider automatically provides an additional server. Customers enjoy a seamless, uninterrupted application process, and IT admins don’t have to field scores of complaints about site performance issues.

How the Cloud Powers Operational Efficiency

A cloud migration can drastically shrink your IT workload, as well as the number of manual tasks employees need to perform. With modern cloud-based apps, you can automate almost any data-dependent process.

For example, suppose a credit union has an ever-growing stack of loan applications to review. Team members end up working through lunches and even overtime as they try to push what seems like a huge stone up an increasingly steep hill.

Now imagine a cloud-based app—we’ll call it Sisyphus—that does the following:

• Automatically validates data that applicants enter. It makes sure salary figures, the values of assets, addresses, names, zip codes, and more get entered correctly. When the data doesn’t conform to validation standards, the system guides the applicant through how to adjust each entry.
• Automates the credit check process. It prepares all the documents needed to run each applicant’s credit. This process also integrates with the data validation tool, which improves accuracy.
• Automatically issues an initial approval decision. Sysiphus sends a preliminary approval decision to a human, outlining the data that led to the decision.
• Automatically flags risk factors, such as high debt-to-income ratios or the number of delinquent credit accounts over the past seven years.
• Automatically sends an email to the applicant, letting them know their application is being processed and the approximate number of days they’ll have to wait to get a final decision.

How many hours a week would Sisyphus save the credit union’s staff? Five? 10? More?

In reality, you can do even more. All data-centric processes can be done more efficiently with cloud-based tools.

Common Cloud Services

Contemplating a cloud migration can feel a lot like stepping into a grocery store. So many choices, where to start? Here are some of the most common “aisles” to peruse.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provides your essential computing resources in a cloud environment, such as virtual machines, data storage, and networks. It’s relatively easy to picture if you think of what it takes to build an on-premise infrastructure. You need computers, servers to store vital information, as well as routers and other networking components to connect each machine. IaaS gives you all of this in the cloud while enabling seamless connections between every computational resource. Users can connect a laptop or even a mobile device to your cloud infrastructure and get to work. Whether they’re in the office, at home, taking a “work away” day, or on a business trip, they can stay productive as long as they have an internet connection.

Also, with IaaS, communication between each device and all of your apps happens in the cloud. The same goes for conferences and meetings, as well as collaboration sessions. When it’s time to add a new employee, your cloud provider can supply their virtual computing environment quickly and with consistency.

Desktop as a Service (DaaS)

Desktop as a service (DaaS) gives you entire computers in the cloud via virtual machines (VMs). As mentioned above, your VMs connect via your IaaS system. Many companies also use managed cloud services to optimize their DaaS resources. For instance, Azure Virtual Desktop support services can handle any connectivity or performance issues encountered while using an Azure VM environment.

The benefits of DaaS stand out when it’s time to scale. Suppose your company merges with another, and you decide to combine sales departments. Your virtual environment is convenient, fast, and inexpensive, so the M&A team decides to migrate the other company’s workers to your system.

Instead of buying each person a new desktop or laptop, you simply spin up a new computer for each team member using your DaaS provider. You can then choose how you’ll let them connect, perhaps using a secure VPN with multi-factor authentication to reduce the risk of attacks. In a matter of minutes, you can have a new employee up and running, and they have all the apps and computational muscle they need.

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)

Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) gives you the ability to back up and restore essential data and apps if some kind of disaster strikes. Rather than set up a backup server in your office or at another disaster recovery site, you have all of your storage resources in your cloud environment.

You simply replicate the systems you need in the cloud and set up ongoing backups. If a major storm damages your on-premise infrastructure, no worries. Everything is backed up in the cloud and ready for action. If an attacker encrypts your on-prem network, you can wipe everything and restore operations in a relatively short amount of time.

Healthcare cloud solutions are common beneficiaries of DRaaS solutions. They are as integral to risk management as a backup generator. Suppose, for example, the area a hospital is in gets hit with a major snowstorm. As a result, many of the billing staff simply can’t make it to work. The roads are too bad. To make it worse, there’s a power surge that damages some of the on-premise network. But patients are still arriving by ambulance, and those already in the hospital have a range of billing needs as well.

With a DRaaS solution, you can spin up the apps your billing staff needs to work from home. Also, the data on their on-prem computers has already been backed up to the cloud, so they can access it remotely. This minimizes the storm’s disruption and bolsters the revenue pipeline.

Cloud Cybersecurity Services

Cloud cybersecurity services provide many of the same protections as traditional solutions, such as firewalls, antimalware, intrusion detection, attack mitigation, and secure access systems. But the cloud versions of these protections are more flexible, scalable, and customizable.

For this reason, optimal cyber resiliency almost invariably requires migrating at least some of your security to the cloud.

Picture a financial institution, for example, that hosts customer data and a range of business-critical apps. By migrating these to the cloud, they can also migrate many of their cybersecurity safeguards.

For instance, while an on-premise firewall may be expensive to upgrade, a cloud-based firewall is maintained by the cloud provider. A financial institution can even employ an always-active security operations center (SOC) that continuously monitors its network for suspicious activity, such as data theft or denial of service attacks.

Similarly, HIPAA-compliant cloud hosting can also take advantage of cloud cybersecurity tools. One common example is cloud encryption. Encryption protocols have to constantly change to ensure that legacy protocols—which may have already been cracked by attackers—have been replaced by more modern ones. For healthcare businesses, the cloud provider makes sure their encryption protects patient data in accordance with HIPAA requirements.

Hybrid Cloud Solutions

With a hybrid cloud strategy, you incorporate a public cloud, such as AWS or Azure, and a private cloud, such as an on-premise infrastructure, combining them into a unified system. You then have the ability to move data between your private and public clouds seamlessly. The same goes for applications, which users can access either remotely or while in the office. If you have to make an app available to a remote or new employee, it can be deployed in the cloud, and, if necessary, its data could come from your private server, such as one in your office.

For many organizations, a hybrid cloud migration strikes a comfortable balance between a full-on cloud commitment and keeping everything on premises. For instance, a financial institution may start by hosting its website in a public cloud environment. But it may keep sensitive trading applications on premises.

Hybrid cloud setups are also convenient for organizations that want to scaffold their cloud migration over time. The hybrid architecture gives you the freedom to both keep digital assets in a private environment and seamlessly enjoy smooth data transmissions with public cloud-based resources. As your needs change, you can then transition one or more in-house or private cloud-based systems to your public cloud provider.

Cloud Cost Optimization: The Key to an Efficient Cloud Infrastructure

Circling back to the grocery store analogy, it’s easy to enter a cloud “aisle” and grab a few too many goodies. It’s also easy to buy more than you need. Then you end up with shelves stocked with stuff that you never actually use. With the cloud, it can be easy for excess spending to go unnoticed, at least for a while.

Take virtual machines as an example. Your cloud infrastructure management team can predict how much computational power you need and choose the best VMs for your needs. But without an understanding of how cloud computing workloads operate, it’s easy for even a very knowledgeable on-prem IT expert to end up spending too much. Opting for a powerful VM when only a modest one is needed can quickly eat away at budget headroom.

For instance, your accounts receivable team members may only use a half dozen apps each. The data they work with is minimal, mostly text-based, and doesn’t often require high-speed processing or transmissions.

On the other side of the spectrum would be a team of financial analysts that need to run a complex financial modeling system in the cloud. The model’s prediction system must process terabytes of data, drawing its inputs from portfolios packed with company information. It then has to provide real-time insights regarding the best stocks to purchase based on current conditions. For example, it may recommend which stocks are best ot purchase when a certain country has been hit with international sanctions in the midst of a grain shortage due to a drought in the Midwest and rising cobalt prices in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

That takes a lot of computational power. So spending a little extra on a powerful VM would make sense for that team.

When you make these decisions well, over the course of dozens of deployments for several departments, your cloud savings add up quickly.

How Cloud Infrastructure Management Saves You Money

Cloud infrastructure management saves you money by making sure you get the exact resources you need without straining your budget. At the same time, your management services also regularly check for opportunities to save you more money.

Suppose you want to migrate a few business-critical apps to the cloud, and you’re not quite sure which provider to use, AWS or Azure. There are several considerations that a cloud infrastructure management provider may already have top of mind:

• Whether your computational needs require standard solid state drives (SSDs) or premium SSDs
• The amount of storage you’ll need
• The optimal length of your subscription, such as one year versus three years
• The costs associated with data egress, or moving data out of the cloud, for each application
• The attributes of Amazon Workspaces compared with Azure Virtual Desktop, specifically how they’ll each benefit your computational requirements

What results is a complicated Goldilocks and the Three Bears scenario where your cloud management provider finds just the right balance based on different operational scenarios—and how much they cost.

Using their deep knowledge of cloud migration and services, your provider can save you thousands each month by pinpointing exactly what you need.

The Role of Cloud Migration Services

Cloud migration services take the grunt work out of your cloud move by providing you with cloud experts who do this for a living. They understand how to:

• Guide you through choosing the best cloud provider based on your business goals and budget constraints
• Structure your migration strategy, timing each phase in a way that minimizes operational disruption
• Educate your staff regarding how to get the most out of their cloud resources
• Advise which apps you may want to add to your cloud computing system to enhance productivity
• Choose the best cloud security tools to protect sensitive data and systems
• Meet compliance requirements by choosing the right cloud architecture
• Conduct application refactoring, data cleaning, and other technical considerations that often come up during a migration

A VMware to cloud migration, for example, can go much smoother with cloud migration experts by your side. Some applications may have to be rehosted or re-platformed as you shift from an on-prem VMware system to a cloud-based one. While this may involve some disruption, your migration team understands how to minimize the interruptions. They also work through connectivity requirements and throughput metrics to ensure smooth operations post-migration.

You also have the option of going with co-managed IT services, which can reduce your IT team’s workload during a migration. For some IT teams, it makes the most sense to handle some of the migration in-house. But that leaves critical IT tasks without bodies to perform them. With co-managed IT services, you can temporarily transfer these responsibilities to your co-management team, then take them back once your migration is complete.

Start Your Cloud Migration Process Now With Cloud Experts

There’s no reason to go it alone, especially when you have cloud professionals at your disposal. For some organizations, a little guidance is all that’s needed to enable a smooth transition. For others, it makes more sense to offload most or all of the process to an external team so internal employees can focus on their daily work. Either way, RapidScale is ready to help. With years of dedicated cloud migration experience—across several business verticals—RapidScale’s team knows exactly how to maximize your cloud migration ROI. Send us a message today now to start building your strategy.