Moving to the Cloud, But How?
Your business has finally made the decision to move as much of your infrastructure to the cloud as you can. If only this process was as easy as it sounds. Unless your organization is tiny, you probably have a myriad of applications completely intertwined with each other, and all hosted on internal servers. You started with a simple infrastructure, but as you grew, you added applications, making it a little messy. Therefore, making it harder to remove each piece and placing it appropriately in the cloud.
Let’s be clear, you do not have to move everything to the cloud at the same time. So, what strategy should you use? Here are a couple options:
- Move an easy application like email to the cloud and then progress from there. As you start to get more comfortable, you can increase the difficulty level of the applications you move.
- Keep connected workloads together. Make the cloud look like an extension of your network. Be aware that if you move a server to the cloud, you need move the application that is dependent on that server with it. If you don’t keep your connected workloads together, your performance may suffer.
- Move your storage. The cloud is a great solution for redundancy or for offsite storage. Using the cloud as your redundant site means you only pay for the storage your company needs and long-term storage in Microsoft Azure is ridiculously cheap. Once your data is in the cloud, moving additional workloads becomes easier.
- Batch processing solutions is another good option. The cloud offers compute on demand capabilities, so you only need to spin up your batch processes when you need them and can take them back offline when you don’t. You can even take this a step further and leverage your data replication to get real-time reporting capabilities without impacting your business applications. If your lack of reporting is harming your business operations, a move to the cloud could really be a game changer for you.
- Implement a backup/ disaster recover system that leverages the cloud. This requires you to mirror not only your data in the cloud, but your business-compute capabilities as well. If you can identify your business-critical workloads, these workloads can be the first to be restored in the case of a disaster.
Whatever strategy you implore, proceed in a controlled fashion.
If you need help creating your cloud strategy, don’t hesitate to ask. 2W Tech is a technology service provider specializing in infrastructure solutions. We are a Microsoft Gold Partner and have IT Consultants on staff that have expertise with Microsoft Azure cloud solutions. We would be happy to discuss and help you develop a cloud strategy best suited for your business.
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