User Review
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Migrating To The Cloud- As a child in the 1980s, I watched the classic Japanese TV series, “Monkey.” Those of you who remember it know the main character Kongo, a.k.a. Monkey, could summon a cloud that transported him over water and land. He could get places at speeds he could never accomplish on foot. Monkey’s cloud worked simply and magically.
The clouds of today are not as simple as they were for Monkey. We have many choices for running our applications and systems on the cloud: a single public cloud, multiple public clouds, on-premise private cloud or hybrid clouds (which is a combination of the public and private).
IT leaders have a plethora of options to help them execute their cloud strategy and optimize their IT landscape, and there are many benefits to moving applications and workloads to the cloud. Once a decision has been made to get started with cloud initiatives such as cloud migration or on executing a cloud-first strategy, here are a few areas that need attention:
1. Cloud Consumption Cost
Cost is a significant factor when choosing a cloud solution. The cost of resources can be consumed by storage, compute and network, which need to be aggregated to get a top-level analysis of all your cost exposure. You can improve the return on your cloud investment by using solutions that offer continuous cost optimization and cost monitoring.
2. Hidden Costs
You also need to identify all costs in your application infrastructure and ensure all components and dependencies are mapped to expose any “hidden elements.” By modernizing your platforms and applications, you can establish a tighter grip on your software costs and simplify the approach to licensing.
3. Application Performance
Taking control of your costs and having on-going cost transparency are naturally two very important things to consider when thinking about how a cloud environment consumes resources. One often overlooked factor, though, is baselining your application performance. After all, the applications are what consume resources.
If you have the luxury of applications that were developed with an infrastructure-agnostic architecture, you should be able to create baseline performance metrics at any point during a transition to a new cloud environment. You can do this by capturing performance metrics before and after the application migration and then comparing the results to ensure there is no unacceptable delta. One would hope and expect that any move to a new, next-generation cloud platform will yield performance improvements.
