Data Centers Transition to Cloud – Critical Points to Remember

Technology adoption is undergoing a significant change, as many non-negotiable factors need to be considered during the process of data centers and services migrating to the cloud

There are many critical factors during the migration of apps to the cloud. Some can be enumerated as scalability due to elastic consumption, lowering IT costs due to economies of scale, operational instead of a capital expense, and the ability to test a new application quickly to create a faster time to market.

Also Read:  A Data Privacy Day 2023 Playbook: Strategies to Improve Data Privacy

The process of migrating apps to the cloud is not easy, and there are some critical factors to be considered.  Firstly, Self-service tools can reduce resource requirements to automate and integrate across multiple environments. Cost is a significant factor and Without cost predictability, cloud migration is going to be even more challenging.

SaaS and Pay as you go models also promote shadow IT initiatives, impacting both security and cost controls.  Also, solutions spanning both private and public cloud infrastructure drive the need for transparency for monitoring, management, and root cause analysis. Here, standardization plays a critical role and often requires a  value-added advisory service.

The challenge of security has often been touted as one of the key basis for vendor identifications. For firms, apps in the cloud may not have the uniform level of physical controls as they have for on-premise deployment in their individual data centers. Also, the attack surface expands as more apps are accessible over the web. Other security requirements, such as user privacy, user access, and compliance needs, also need to be considered.

Also Read: DSaaS Vendor Combats Cyber Security and Data Privacy Challenges

The journey to cloud migration needs to include the below non-negotiable:

• Scalability and Availability: Auto-scale capability is crucial for organizations looking to automate operations – adding and removing services on demand without manual intervention for licensing and to reclaim capacity when no longer in-use.
• Analytics and visibility: When deploying microservices affecting many applications, analytics, proactive monitoring, and troubleshooting are crucial before they become business disruptions. Monitoring may include information about microservices such as security issues, latency, service uptime, and accessibility problems.
• Security: As hackers probe network and app vulnerabilities to gain access to sensitive data, the prevention of unauthorized access needs to be multi-pronged by – routinely applying security patches, preventing denial of service attacks, preventing the rogue application from running in the enterprise in the cloud, and conducting routine vulnerability assessment scans on container applications.
• Automation: Although there are multiple benefits to a container-based application, it is challenging to troubleshoot, roll out, and manage these microservices quickly. Manually allocating resources for apps and reconfiguring the load balancer to incorporate newly instantiated services is error-prone and in-efficient. It becomes problematic at scale for those specially with short lifetimes. Automating the deployment of services is a necessity for quicker processing.
• Cost Predictability: One of the most critical non-negotiable elements to consider is flexible licensing. As firms move to apps delivery services, the cloud should be able to reuse existing licenses across a hybrid deployment. Many customers deploy on public cloud initially, but cost unpredictability becomes an issue with the scale of the service with usage changing.

Any movement from a physical data center to the cloud requires investment in new capabilities to enable migrating to the new environment. As applications change in how they are built, designed, deployed and consumed, the application delivery infrastructures also have evolved to address the non-negotiables for applications in a continuous integration/delivery, hybrid and multi-cloud deployment.