10 Best Practices for Successful Cloud Implementation
The rush to the cloud is accelerating, as the benefits of cloud implementation increase.
Cloud enables organizations to build new and flexible operating models and inculcate agility to gain a competitive advantage in the highly dynamic and evolving market.
However, to make that implementation smooth and successful, organizations need to do some careful preparation. The cloud journey can be complicated, expensive, resource-draining.
Here are some best practices to help businesses make the most of their cloud investment and implementation:
10 Best Practices for Successful Cloud Implementation
- Build the Cloud Center of Excellence
Like any significant IT investment, cloud initiatives need an organized and directed team that understands the cloud adoption framework and can implement cloud technology aligned with the organizational goals. The Cloud CoE team is responsible for managing the financial, communications, technical, and operational challenges associated with cloud implementation.
The cloud CoE team accelerates the cloud implementation by driving momentum across the organization, developing reusable cloud governance models, and aligning cloud offerings to the organizational strategy.
2. Look Beyond Tech
Successful cloud implementation is far beyond just purchasing Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) from a cloud service provider. To ensure smooth and successful cloud implementation, organizations should adopt the cloud management platforms, governance and compliance monitoring tools, disaster recovery solutions, and professional services. The cloud ecosystem should also include artificial and machine intelligence and platform- and software-as-a-service options.
3. Cultural Change Management
Cloud implementation involves a significant cultural shift in IT. When cultural change is appropriately supported and structured, the cloud migration efforts can be accelerated while minimizing the overall cost of change and improving business agility.
4. Phased Transition
For successful cloud implementation, organizations must begin with rather small applications or use cases and then steadily migrate more and more applications to the cloud as they gain organizational knowledge. It’s advised to start with the services easiest to migrate, including public website hosting and email services, and then move on to databases, multitier platforms, and custom enterprise applications.
5. Cost Management
As organizations consider use cases, their cloud strategies must consider the total cost of cloud implementation and determine the right combination of cloud and on-premise data centers.
6. Cloud Data Management
Often, organizations find it difficult to retrieve data from the cloud than migrating it to the cloud, especially when cloud instances accumulate a massive amount of data over time. Therefore, they should ensure that they move their data to the cloud with a disaster recovery strategy that includes cloud data management.
7. Cloud Security Model
Organizations must develop a cloud security model to identify the security controls aligned with the defined cloud framework. The model would help define the cloud security controls that are required before cloud implementations.
8. Ensure Trusted Internet Connection
Cloud-native solutions require a significant amount of bandwidth that may quickly overwhelm an organization’s Trusted Internet Connection (TIC). Ensure that your cloud service provider has significant experience working with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to successfully virtualize the TIC.
9. Leverage Hybrid Edge
To deliver cloud-based enterprise solutions, organizations must optimize the traffic across a distributed network that can span multiple internet Point of Presence (PoP). To ensure scalable and elastic back-end computing, organizations should follow a hybrid edge approach to integrate on-premise cloud environments and content delivery networks.
10. Choose the Right Cloud Provider
During your cloud implementation process, if you realize you don’t have the right resources to perform some of the required assessments and appropriately execute the implementation strategy, selecting a trusted cloud partner can prove beneficial.
The right cloud services provider can help you properly perform critical analyses, build a solid cloud implementation strategy, choose the right technologies, and deliver a seamless migration.
Veritis Can Help!
As a US-based Cloud Consulting firm, Veritis offers best-in-class cloud services, including public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, and multi-cloud services.
