Are you cloud ready?

As my colleague recently noted, some workloads are destined for the cloud, while others are best suited to remain on-premises. This was in response to comments made by Michael Dell around what he called a “boomerang effect” of the cloud. Dell was talking about companies migrating workloads to the public cloud only to migrate them back to a private cloud after incurring higher costs or reduced performance. We agree with Dell’s opinion that it’s going to be a multi-cloud world.

Yet the world seems to be moving rapidly to the public cloud. Take a look at these recent headlines:

• AWS maintains sizable lead as public cloud market grows 42 percent in Q1
• Google Cloud Has ‘Good Shot’ at Topping AWS by 2022, SVP Greene Says
• Microsoft Azure almost doubles infrastructure cloud market presence

It certainly seems like the public cloud is the place to be, but how do you know where you fit in? Are you really “cloud ready?”

If you’re considering a public cloud migration, there are a few things to keep in mind:

Your workloads should be optimized by the public cloud. In other words, performance should improve or stabilize across bursts of traffic, and delivery speed should not be an issue. You may have to test some different configurations to see what the best mix is before you see significant improvement. Ultimately, moving to the public cloud means that you have regional datacenters, worldwide connectivity, and technology experts working on your infrastructure. Your workloads or user experiences should improve.

For additional flexibility and testing time, look for a service provider who offers free evaluations, evaluation deployment guides, and reliable customer support.

Your business should also be optimized in several ways. One of the most discussed changes after a public cloud migration is the reduction in on-premises expenses. Power, cooling, hardware, software, and other associated expenses should decrease as those resources are retired. Managers need to watch the bottom line, so this gets a lot of attention. However, there are other excellent benefits to a migration. Elasticity, time to market, scalability, and innovation are the benefits mentioned most often.

Licensing is a huge consideration in this category, and you have to carefully consider your strategy in this regard. Look for public cloud solutions that offer Bring Your Own License (BYOL), Pay As You Go (PAYG), and other options. You may find a significant advantage in one licensing model over the others.

Keep your deployment options open. The Shared Responsibility Model gives you complete flexibility in how you secure your workloads in the cloud. Migrating and securing these workloads can be difficult, but it’s easier when you can take familiar technologies with you. A provider that offers multiple deployment types of the same solution can reduce your learning curve. You’ll want to spend your time optimizing your configurations and testing your deployments; not learning how to use a replacement of your on-premises security or data protection solution.

Moving your on-premises solutions to a public cloud is more than just a P2V move, though. Virtual versions of physical machines are not built for the public cloud and cannot take advantage of what the cloud has to offer. Look for solutions that can natively integrate into the fabric of the public cloud. Solutions have to be engineered specifically to work in the public cloud in order for you to achieve the best performance and realize the greatest return.

It’s never too early to start planning. With some careful consideration and the right solution provider, you’ll be cloud ready when the time comes.