You have moved to cloud – what next?

Moving to the cloud is a smart move, but by actually doing it you have simply started your journey – not reached your destination.

Here’s some food for thought on getting the most from your move to cloud, and some key questions to consider as you advance your journey.

Putting the business at the centre of your strategy

The cloud is a business enabler for new growth, customer acquisition, and ensuring compliance regulations are satisfied. It can be used to scale up infrastructure as required, as well as providing SaaS-based tools such as Dropbox to enable greater user productivity.

It is equally important not to think that cloud does everything. For instance, data hosted in Microsoft 365 remains the end user’s responsibility to backup and archive. Although those backups may also be in the cloud, on premise copies can also be kept by using the 3-2-1 backup principle.

The objective of cloud

First, think about the goals you are looking to achieve in your wider business strategy. This could be to quickly launch a new service application for internal or external users, optimising performance across user portals, or carrying out cost rationalisation across applications.

Planning your consumption is also made a lot easier in the cloud. The ‘consumption layer’ of information, data and applications is not restricted by on-premise hardware.

If you have made the transition to cloud, you can also adapt your strategy once you are ‘there’. Run POCs for different projects on multi-clouds to test for latency, usability and performance.

Think about your service approach

The cloud also offers many different operating models such as IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. Each has pros and cons, and you need to look into the best service strategy for your organisation. Here’s the differences in a nutshell:

Infrastructure as a Service gives access to cloud-based platforms. These enable core services including networking and storage.

Platform as a Service refers to the web-based service tools the cloud offers and enables.

Software as a Service is similar to PaaS, but refers to third party software available online.

As you plan your service approach in the cloud, it is also important to keep milestones and end dates in mind. The cloud can seem like a mission accomplished, but in reality you have simply modernised the way your IT services are provided to the business. Projects should still be planned with the same endpoints and goals as in legacy IT environments.

Talking with a specialist is a great way to leverage best practices for cloud adoption. Find out more today.