Cloud-Ready Infrastructure Optimization

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Businesses are making the move from traditional in-house infrastructure to the cloud to capitalize on the cost and space savings. This migration also sets the business up for future success, staying ahead of potential obsoletion.

Unfortunately, the shift toward the cloud or even a hybrid cloud approach can be a monumental task. Here are some tips for creating cloud-ready infrastructure optimization.

Monitor and Assess

Before making any changes, it’s important to monitor and assess the current infrastructure and identify clear goals about the upcoming shift to the cloud.

During this phase, it’s important to outline what needs to be done and who will be in charge of what throughout the transition. It’s also important to identify if a massive migration will take place or if a hybrid cloud will be used for a slower shift.

Choose the Cloud Solution

Determine which cloud solution is right for your business needs. Whether you’re doing a shallow integration or a deep cloud integration, you must decide whether you’ll go single or multi-cloud.

Optimizing your infrastructure for a single cloud solution is a lot more straightforward than opting for a multi-cloud solution. The challenge is finding the right provider and the risk of putting all of your proverbial eggs in one basket. Optimizing your infrastructure to work with a specific provider, then discovering that the vendor relationship isn’t right for your business can be a costly mistake.

When choosing a multi-cloud solution, there are a few ways to handle the division. You can either assign a specific application to a specific cloud, use multiple providers or optimize your applications to work with any provider or system. This is sometimes referred to as being cloud agnostic.

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Identify Performance Metrics

As previously mentioned, it’s essential to have proper monitoring protocols and programs in place for the duration of the optimization and shift to the cloud. For that monitoring to be effective, however, there must be performance metrics in place.

There are various metrics that could be considered, both from an end-user standpoint as well as an internal usage standpoint. These metrics should be in alignment with both the migration and overall business goals.

Standardize

This is an opportunity to create standard operating procedures and ensure that the organization is set up for future operational success. This means putting practices in place that ensure the environment is optimized for cost, usage, and performance.

The standardization efforts ensure that you’re not moving a big mess from one server to another. Instead, this is a form of spring cleaning and downsizing before moving forward.

Optimize and Shift

To complete the optimization process, standardizations must be perfected, and automations can be integrated to reduce work-heavy tasks. Once these are ready, the server shift can begin. During this time, using cloud-ready integrations and monitoring will help monitor the data in real-time, alerting the organization of any issues as they arise.

Further Considerations

This is just a basic overview of making the shift from internal infrastructure to the cloud. One of the main considerations not mentioned in this list is cybersecurity. Ensuring the right protocols to support the migration and protect secure data is critical for success. Additionally, vetting third-party providers and choosing the right one for your business needs will play a significant role in your overall success.

Pricing is another consideration when looking at cloud solutions for the organization. Cloud pricing can either be more cost-effective or more expensive, depending on a number of factors. It’s important to take a high-level view of what’s included in the pricing of the options you review, otherwise, the first bill might be a shock to the system.

By keeping these steps and additional considerations in mind, you can optimize your infrastructure to be cloud-ready, whether you opt to migrate now or wait until a later time.

–EOF (The Ultimate Computing & Technology Blog) —