When it comes to choosing a cloud platform, Azure, GCP, AWS and a host of others now offer an endless array of choices, tools, and options for using them. But your immediate and long-term business pursuit of specific business outcomes should drive the choice of a cloud platform. The thing to remember is that technology does not dictate outcomes, it only works in service to reaching those outcomes.
Every business needs to transform applications and workloads from a cost center to a profit center through services and products that deliver efficiency to internal end users and practical benefits to customers via an improved customer experience. That can mean anything and everything from migration for scalability and costs to faster development and process/service improvement (CI/CD pipeline, automation developer support, containerization and microservices). Understanding what is it you want to achieve by moving to the cloud will guide platform choice for several reasons that include:
- Their prioritized cloud platform features align with your needs
- The type of data you want to store
- Platform flexibility and scalability
- Budget and cost alignment
- Meeting your industry’s compliance standards with certifications for data security and privacy
- Employee implementation training and support
- Cloud platform and services availability
- Level of troubleshooting support
- What are the SLAs and promised turnaround time in case of issues?
- The platform’s track record with clients in your industry and their feedback on results
The cloud platforms are building blocks of services that enable you to create infrastructure that delivers one or more specific business outcomes quickly, flexibly, and cost-effectively. That can include any of the following:
- Virtual machines for quick application implementation
- Flexible database building, processing, migrating, and storage options
- Network creation and management (often through abstraction)
- Launching and extending container applications and microservices
- Kubernetes cluster management and orchestration
- Support for:
- Big Data analytics
- Machine learning (ML)
- Artificial intelligence (AI)
- Internet of things (IoT)
- API layer creation and management
- Combining infrastructural environments
- Easy management of hybrid, and multi-cloud solutions
- Cross-solution migrations
- Security, access control, and process monitoring
Most companies have started their cloud transformation in big or small ways, but far too many do so without a sound cloud strategy to guide them. Your cloud strategy needs to be based on specific business goals. It must also have some flexibility built in to accommodate unforeseen market, business, and socioeconomic changes. That’s why your existing infrastructure will always be a big part of ongoing and future platform choices.
Existing Infrastructure’s Part in Cloud Platform Choice(s)
The current state of your infrastructure will have a big impact on future choices for a cloud platform. Everything from software licenses to legacy applications may become part of the decision based on how mission critical they are.
The same can be said for the level of expertise with your current personnel, from IT to all departments. Current IT and OT infrastructure and the people that maintain it and use it may not have the expertise (or desire) to make significant shifts in technology via cloud platform tools and services. Developers may have specific entrenched tools and processes that they use, which can influence platform options and compatibility.
Moving to containers, Kubernetes, and microservices can show a clear path to improved business services products and customer/end user experiences with clear ROI. But if the IT team lacks the expertise, platform, and associated third-party consulting support, it will be difficult to make it a reality.
While every platform touts an ability to accommodate all industries and needs, how they do it and to what degree may vary. Having a platform that has clear track records in prioritizing your industry or sector is important for near term and long-term business outcomes. It always comes back to looking at choices through the lens of specific business outcomes where sector or industry needs may include:
- Retail requirements like ecommerce platform development, AppDev, analytics, demand forecasting and omnichannel operations support
- Finance with specific online banking and application services, technical debt with legacy mainframes, risk analysis, and security/compliance needs
- Healthcare and Life Sciences for virtual care support, analytics, IoT, application scalability, and technical debt that hampers platform opportunities
- Media and Entertainment with high-speed content sharing, access and storage, bandwidth, edge computing, containerization, and microservices needs, among others
- Gaming where building quick and efficient infrastructures, data warehouses and AI/VR needs may hold sway
- Telecommunications with 5G support, IoT data analytics and edge computing integration needs
- Manufacturing needs like SAP support, logistics optimization, digital twin, IoT, AI/ML need for production and supply chain efficiencies
Cloud Migration and the data mobility promise
Businesses often base application migration on overcoming bottlenecks to business and service growth. With successful cloud migration, the driving forces are functionality, reliability, scalability, security, cost, and ease of use. They often chose migration due to:
- Outages affecting product quality and customer retention
- Scaling issues that prevent smooth new customer onboarding
- Functionality and ease of use issues adversely affecting seed of product and service development
Security
Many businesses have cited security as a reason to move to and away from the cloud, but they base these perspectives on individual use cases. The truth is, it’s always about planning, execution, management, and platform support for those use cases. While regular audits for security are a given, it’s important to understand the mechanisms a platform sets for security and its ongoing compliance with SSAE 16 and ISAE 3402 type 2 standards.
Why the need for a new infrastructure?
Container-native data services enable enterprises to leverage the power of the cloud for both application and data agility. Gartner predicts that by 2022, over 75 percent of global organizations will run containerized applications in production. But this choice and the chosen platform you will execute it on must also support the needs for:
- Speed
- Services
- New business
- Stronger market share that delivers top and bottom-line growth with customers and/or internal efficiencies that save time and money.
New infrastructure choices like containers, microservices and Kubernetes have enormous benefits, but are not suitable for every situation. For example, organizations move to Kubernetes containerized applications to:
- Automate container operations by eliminating difficult and time-consuming manual application development and scaling processes
- Avoid lock-in
- Simplify IT management
- Increase IT agility
- Better leverage IoT, big data, and AI/ML
This powerful orchestration and automation can be complex to implement as you must rethink everything from security, storage, and compute to application design, testing, deployment, and more.
Going multi-cloud and hybrid
Containers, Kubernetes and microservices may require cross platform integration as businesses move to multi-cloud strategies. Over 92 percent of respondents have adopted multi-cloud with most averaging the use of 5 clouds or more, according to Flexera’s 2021 State of the Cloud Report.
The need to deliver the best business outcomes and matching that need to the right platform is what drives this statistic. There are also additional considerations that affect the choice of platform when it comes to business outcomes in a multi-cloud world.
Key Considerations for Choosing a Cloud Platform
Providers build cloud platforms to grow and change to meet additional needs and demands from businesses. But to differentiate themselves in the marketplace, they often emphasize different services, architectures, and methods of achieving a particular goal. Before wading into the rough seas of nuanced differences, its best to build your cloud strategy boat based on some key considerations that the platform should provide, including:
- The ability to transmit and process data much faster for improved service performance and lower costs
- Real-time migration and migration support and tools that are based on SLA (service-level agreement) that ensure a 99.95% availability for a single instance and a 99.99% availability for several instances in different regions.
- Serverless technology that makes it easier to create apps using e.g. virtual machines (upon setting and preparing the environment in advance), storage services, databases (SQL and NoSQL), or machine learning (ML).
- Automated implementation tools and easy integration of third-party automation tools are paramount for effective use of the right cloud platform. This is particularly true with cloud native apps that are based on containers and open-source container-orchestration systems like Kubernetes.
- Developing new services that make implementation and application management faster and easier via Kubernetes orchestration, containers, serverless, microservices and effective CI/CD pipelines, among others
- Strong process monitoring and failure detection are important tool sets that enables constant awareness of businesses regarding how they are using their assets and to see ways of improving efficiency and costs by:
- The ability to scan virtual machines or containers in search of bottlenecks reducing application performance
- Real-time inspection of your source code in production, that doesn’t slow down or stop your applications
- Load performance analysis of CPU for the app in production
- Application performance management tools used as part of hybrid or multi-cloud solutions
The chosen cloud platform must be suitable for storing and processing large data sets on the terabytes or petabytes scale. You need a foundation for analytics that can incorporate AI/ML, which can translate into advanced forecasting algorithm creation.
Cost
Cost is another factor to consider where budget and business outcomes require a delicate balance. The weight of these factors can also fluctuate based on whether you’re a startup, small business, or an enterprise. Their weight can also change based on changing scalability needs where repatriation may be more cost-effective for an application for instance.
It’s often true that we can build new applications and services in the cloud at minimal costs, but we must weigh this against its impact in terms of ROI to the business. Migrating legacy applications to the cloud can be expensive, but the long-term ROI may be immeasurable to the business’ growth potential and market dominance. You may have time to do the job incrementally to save money, but not doing it at all will result in devastating costs to the business that outweighs any well-planned migration strategy and investment.
Per-second billing is often preferable to per minute billing, and since most businesses will operate a multi-cloud strategy, this enables them to factor this approach into applications and workload storage placement. This supports the imperative to pay only for actual usage.
Budget control
The platform’s presentation of transparent panels, charts, or tables that let businesses set budgets based on specific business outcomes through usage is important to cost containment. The platform should have robust abilities to enable usage alerts for budget planning across projects and services. This is crucial to your ability to gauge whether each particular cloud use is delivering ROI or has exceeded it by going above a cost-to-benefit threshold.
Migrations bring their own costs and require human resources, time, expertise, and quality control, which must be weighed through a lens of cost versus ROI. This will be based on each application and what you hope to do with it in business terms. Also, operating in the cloud can be more expensive depending on how your business outcome goals fall in terms of hierarchy.
Scalability alone has its costs that can be unsustainable above a given level. This makes it important to determine a necessary level of scalability, which can then be adjusted based on the cost of achieving it.
Why a Cloud Platform Expert Partner Is Key to Successful Business Outcomes
Every major cloud platform has developed extensive support systems and documentation to help businesses implement, use, and troubleshoot their services. The challenge is that this is predicated on your IT team having the expertise in all the platforms and their service offerings to determine which is best suited for your business and its specific outcomes.
The Techolution team of experts across all aspects of cloud management have not only worked extensively with the major platforms, bt also dealt with endless business, industry, sector and customization needs This provides a unique insight into the best overall platform for the most uses, While Techolution has become a GCP partner based on this experience and expertise, they maintain close ties and expertise with all other major providers to accommodate a multi-cloud world where specific business needs may be best served by specific platforms.
By partnering with Techolution in both your cloud strategy and platform choice, businesses gain the expertise they need across cloud, AI/ML Kubernetes, containers, microservices, and a host of disciplines that your team may lack. The ability to deliver turnkey solutions or fractional services expertise, the goal is to deliver on your specific business outcomes quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively while making sure your team has the skills to keep moving it forward.
The choice of cloud platforms clearly depends on several factors, and having support in making those decisions is crucial to success. Overall, cloud platforms and technology innovations that they bring must be justified in their use and implementation based on your business model, landscape, and market changes rather than possibilities that do not have quantifiable ROI within a predetermined time span.
To learn how Techolution can help you deliver on business outcomes with the right Cloud platform and strategy, visit our Cloud Modernization page.
