It’s no secret that cloud services are fast becoming the backbone of business technology, as organisations look to break free from the limitations of traditional IT infrastructures. With an increasingly demand to adapt quickly to marketplace changes and new trends, cloud services offer the flexibility and stability to meet these challenges.
However, with numerous cloud services now available choosing the right cloud solution to meet your business needs may seem like a challenge in itself, and should be met with careful consideration and planning.
When it comes to cloud migration, setting clear goals and understanding what you wish achieve from your new cloud infrastructure can save a lot of headache further downline. Lets take a look at the core steps and the key areas that should be considered to achieve a successful cloud migration;
Migration steps:
Step 1:
Taking lead of your cloud selection and migration, a ‘Cloud Architect’ will ensure the right plans and steps are put into place to make the overall migration seamless, whilst ensuring the cloud is addressing all of your business needs.
Step 2:
The migration process is simple;
Analyse your workloads, servers and applications
Decide on the resources and cloud databases needed and deploy them
Monitor the resources and scale up or down accordingly
Step 3:
Next step, is to access applications and their usage, and understand when they are required, for example, if there are seasonal peaks. This allows you to shutdown systems when they’re not needed, and scale systems according to on and off-peak times. To ease this job, cloud automation and monitoring tools are available to provide on-going, accurate reports of your application usage.
One step further…
To help manage your cloud applications, you may consider taking advantage of ‘Managed Kubernetes’. This refers to a platform that automates many of the manual process involved in deploying, managing and scaling containerised applications, and can be ‘managed’ by a third party. This can cover anything from dedicated support, hosting pre-configured environments, to full hosting and operation.
Choosing a European Provider
When choosing a cloud hosting provider it is important to understand the locality of their data centres, with EU hosting providers being the preferred option thanks to the security surrounding their data.
The recent CLOUD Act (Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act), which enables US authorities to demand data directly from US tech companies has called into question the security of their European branches. If your data is stored by a US owned company, your data is subject to the CLOUD Act, and raises the question of who has access to your data?
Services effected by this Act include, Google, Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure.
To overcome this security flaw, businesses should seek out cloud providers based in the EU who do not store or process data anywhere other than European datacentres. Other than being subject to GDPR guidelines, there is no danger of being obliged to disclose your personal data.
Common Mistakes
1. Lift and Shift
It is not uncommon for businesses to be overly eager in migrating their services, with many engaging in a ‘lift and shift’ approach, before they re-factor, re-architect and re-strategize. Once migrated, IT teams may be side tracked with other projects, meaning they don’t complete the intended transformation. The end result is often a poorly designed infrastructure, limited cloud storage and functionality, and all at a cost that is much higher than expected.
2. New system, same rules
Another mistake sees all the ‘requirements’ and ‘rules’ from the previous cloud infrastructure carried through to the new. Cloud migration provides the perfect opportunity to re-evaluate previous choices, identify limitations and to properly align the technology with your business needs and strategies.
3. Vendor lock in
If a business has multi-cloud strategy, a priority focus will be to avoid vendor lock in. ‘Managed Kubernetes’ can help, and allow you to use multiple cloud providers to meet your business needs- the key is to make your workloads and portable as possible
Why EBC Group?
EBC Group is a UK owned Managed Service Provider, with access to 3 privately owned data centres, the primary housed at the BT Tower, BT House in Birmingham city centre. Our ebcCloud solutions offer a flexible range of cloud solutions to meet your business requirements, with unrivalled communications, connectivity and security from our own UK data centres or our Enterprise Cloud via our partnership with Ionos.
On-premises vs Public Cloud vs Private Cloud:
Public / Enterprise Cloud
Cloud services provided by global businesses such IONOS give businesses the power of enterprise level infrastructure at a fraction of the costs. Benefits such as per minute consumption-based billing benefits businesses that only want to pay for data and services when they use them.
Whilst your data and hardware are kept in the cloud, it is completely private to your organisation, sitting on dedicated infrastructure that is entirely owned by you. A dedicated leased line into a Private Cloud is fully replicated, provides complete security.
A fully managed, multi-tenanted cloud solution that provides businesses with a high performance, reliability and scalability. It takes the complexity out of managing your own infrastructure and provides the perfect blend of public and private cloud
With hybrid cloud a business uses a combination of on-premise and cloud infrastructure. There are a range of reasons that a business may choose to do this, from compliance issues, to the size of the data they are dealing with.
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