How long has it been since your last checkup at the doctor? Perhaps a year? Maybe longer? Fortunately, even if you haven’t had a checkup for quite a while, there may not be any serious issues.
That’s likely not true when it comes to cloud “checkups” or assessments, however. Much like a physical checkup, a cloud assessment lets you know how the “body” of your infrastructure is doing. It sheds light on things you need to address and lets you know the kinds of workloads it can handle in the future. While going without a doctor’s visit for several months usually isn’t a problem, going without a cloud assessment can result in considerable fallout.
But a cloud assessment is far more than a digital health check. It’s a crucial step in your budgeting and strategic growth initiatives.
With comprehensive assessments performed at the right time intervals, you can establish a foundation for saving money and improving performance across your organization. Here’s how a cloud assessment can drive smarter planning and budgeting.
A cloud assessment is an evaluation of your cloud environment and resources from the perspective of how well they’re supporting your organization’s goals. It gives you critical information you can use to decide how to best utilize your cloud, whether to add more services, ways to save money, and how to limit risk.
It’s like a checkup that also gives you an exercise plan, dietary recommendations, and ways to avoid issues in the future.
The cloud enables greater agility and creativity, but it can also put enterprises in a tough position—especially when it comes to:
A cloud assessment also empowers your team to build a strategic roadmap for flexible, goal-focused growth. For instance, you may be considering implementing AI into a core operational system, such as customer service or marketing plans. Will your current cloud setup support this move? Do you have to change some of the apps you currently use to make sure your AI-powered solution gets the data it needs? A cloud assessment can answer these and more questions.
One of the primary benefits of managed cloud services is ongoing cloud assessments. With a managed service provider, you don’t have to worry about whether any stones have been left unturned. However, if you want to DIY your assessment, here are six crucial steps to follow:
Before you get into the technical aspects of your cloud assessment, it’s important to understand why you’re doing it. More specifically, the assessment needs to surface more than random information about your environment. Instead, you need to look for specific ways to use the cloud to support your objectives.
For instance, an e-commerce company may be seeing its cloud bill climb, climb, and climb some more. Over the last six months, it’s gone up an average of 12% per month. So, one of the objectives of their cloud assessment is to reduce cloud costs over the next six months. For example, the assessment may reveal that the company’s app pulls unnecessary data from its cloud-hosted database—information that customers don’t need to make purchase decisions.
By heading into the assessment with the objective of saving money, the process becomes more valuable right away.
During the discovery phase, you document all of your cloud resources and what they do. You also build a map showing how different processes are intertwined, either through integrations or dependency relationships.
Here’s a basic checklist of what to analyze for your current cloud environment:
It’s also important to assess what you have beyond the cloud. Effective cloud infrastructure management also requires assessing the skills of team members who interface with your cloud resources. For example, some team members may not understand how the costs of different cloud services impact your overall spend. Making sure they know the expenses associated with each cloud service is an important element of any cloud cost optimization effort.
A pending migration is a common driver for a cloud assessment, mostly to allay concerns about the technical feasibility of the migration. Some concerns may be fairly straightforward, such as whether a cloud resource can handle specific data types.
But sometimes the assessment needs to clarify more complicated issues, such as which elements of a custom business app can take advantage of containerized development tools in the cloud.
In most cases, the assessment will reveal the need to do one of the following in connection with a migration:
While these adjustments are common, they’re not always the best choice. Your cloud assessment may make it clear that one of the following is a better move:
Even if you’re performing a cloud assessment without an upcoming migration planned, it’s good to keep a potential future migration in mind. For many growing organizations, at least some sort of migration is likely, even if that means migrating between two cloud solutions.
For example, you may currently have a dual-cloud architecture, such as one that uses both Azure and AWS. What if you want to stick to just one in the future? Your assessment should consider what would be involved in facilitating that shift.
Your cost analysis should be segmented according to the costs associated with 1) what you already have running and 2) your future costs if you were to add or subtract cloud resources. The data that this reveals can inform a range of future decisions.
For instance, if you’re close to hitting your budget ceiling, removing a costly cloud service can give you enough headroom to invest in a growth initiative. Or an on-premise solution may end up costing less to run in the cloud.
The list goes on and on. Here are some guidelines for performing your cost analysis:
Building a cloud roadmap involves planning how to execute any shifts in cloud strategy. Notice how building your roadmap is relatively late in the assessment lifecycle? That’s because what you learn in the previous steps should heavily inform your roadmap.
Take, for example, the cost analysis step. After analyzing the costs of moving an app to the cloud, you may discover that it’s too high for your current budget cycle. This significantly changes your roadmap’s timeline. In turn, the people and resources available may be different because the implementation will now happen the following year. Enterprises should avoid jumping to this step too early.
Building a roadmap should take the following into consideration:
To smooth out any wrinkles in your roadmap, start with a strategic pilot. For example, if you’re moving several collections in an app’s database to the cloud, and your assessment shows everything looks good (i.e., no data integrity or transformation issues) that doesn’t mean you should dive in head first. Begin by migrating a less sensitive collection. Track the time it takes, observe performance, and evaluate how your app behaves when calling your new cloud-hosted database.
This approach gives you confidence, minimizes risk, and sets the stage for fearless growth. Then whatever you learn can inform how you migrate the rest of your collections.
What if budget-focused cloud adjustment doesn’t save you as much money as you’d projected? Or what if a migration adds so much latency to an app that it’s no longer viable? Even though taking the above steps should prevent these kinds of issues, it’s still best to include a contingency plan in your roadmap. This may involve:
To illustrate, maybe your team loves AWS. You assess the efficiency of running a Windows-based virtual machine in AWS and decide it’s a good move. But what if it ends up costing more than you projected? Your contingency plan may involve coming up with another option.
You need to know how well your assessment is supporting your planning or budgeting efforts. This is why it’s important to evaluate both the effects of your assessment and the assessment process itself.
Your assessment process could fall short if it fails to uncover crucial blind spots. It could also fall short of expectations if it doesn’t adequately prepare you to achieve an important business objective.
For instance, you may conduct an assessment to find ways that your cloud services can better meet the needs of customers who require technical assistance. You decide to use AWS’s development environment to build a custom system. The dev team’s excited to get started, and the execs are on board, too.
But what about Amazon Connect? It’s already available in the AWS environment, and has plenty of features, perhaps enough to vastly improve your customers’ experiences. Why reinvent the wheel by building a customized solution?
By incorporating evaluation and optimization into your assessment processes, you reduce the risk of making these kinds of mistakes. You may discover ways to adjust your planning and budgetary decisions for even better results.
A cloud assessment is far more than an infrastructure health check. It’s an important early step in making sure you’re getting the most out of the cloud without adding strain to your budget. It also sets the stage for innovative uses of the cloud in the future because you may discover better tools or new ways of meeting business goals.
But you don’t have to DIY your assessment. RapidScale provides co-managed IT services that can include cloud assessments. And RapidScale’s team of cloud experts can assess your current environment and highlight new and exciting ways of using the cloud to reduce costs and optimize results. Discover more by connecting with us today.