Moving to the cloud has countless benefits for large enterprises. From a substantial cost reduction to increased accessibility, efficiency, and availability of data, the benefits of migrating to the cloud are many.
Enterprises across the world are working hard on their digital transformations. The load on on-premise servers is decreasing, they are training their employees to work with their cloud infrastructure and are increasing their productivity by making them mobile. Cloud not only helps enterprises in fine-tuning their inner workings but improves customer experience as well. Cloud helps enterprises in letting their customers know that they value and care for them.
Customer experience counts for a lot and can be a competitive advantage for your company. According to a study, 76% of customers expect their brands to understand their needs and the companies that provide good customer experience with the help of the cloud, experience 1.6 times higher customer satisfaction rate and 1.9 times higher average order value. So, because of figures like these, enterprises are pouring money into their digital transformation campaigns. But the problem is, not everyone can migrate to the cloud properly.
According to Forbes, 70% of digital transformation and cloud migration campaigns end up being a disaster. There are many reasons why many companies are unable to migrate to the cloud properly, from employee resistance to choosing the migration method.
But one the most significant contributor to this harrowing figure is the fact that many large enterprises don’t really know that much about cloud solutions , intelligent or otherwise, before jumping in, aside from how awesome it is. So given below are some crucial things as a large enterprise you should keep in mind about your move to an intelligent cloud:
1. Hybrid cloud and Multi-cloud make cloud migration efficient
There are many ways to migrate your infrastructure to the cloud. You can just pick your entire infrastructure and put it in the cloud all at once. But there are many risks to doing it. It will hamper your current business flow. There are financial risks involved, and, also, if something goes wrong and the migration isn’t finished, then you can experience an enterprise-wide downtime.
Hybrid cloud and multi-cloud can help decrease these risks. Enterprises now realizing the benefits of adopting hybrid and multi-clouds because they offer more flexibility and help them in adding more features and cloud capabilities to their on-premise system.
Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud help in rapid innovation without affecting the normal working of the rest of the business process. The ability to tweak and edit your cloud environment while still providing quality services to your customers and your employees is critical in today’s world. Bringing more business-centric cloud capabilities without disrupting the current business flow helps you cut down costs and provide better customer experience.
Hybrid and Multi-cloud safeguard you against the loss of data as well. It helps you in migrating to the cloud in a step-wise approach without exposing your entire business flow to a failure while you are migrating to the cloud.
2. Software change tracking keeps everyone on the same page
In an intelligent cloud, a single change in the process can change the entire environment, and a single change in technology or software can influence many processes at the same time.
Inside an intelligent cloud, a single piece of software is connected to many processes. So if you make a software change, you need to make sure that everyone is on the same page and that the change was expected and will not disrupt the entire process.
You have to make some standard and release practices that don’t create too much turbulence and shut down the entire environment. Every release should be well planned, well tested, and everyone on the IT and business side of the enterprise should be made aware of it. In a distributed environment such as this, a single change can bring an entire enterprise to a screeching halt.
So you need to set some guidelines about how a change will be deployed to the cloud.
Also, every software change should add some value to the cloud environment, either on the customer experience or enterprise side. Unrequired changes can make your cloud environment slower and clunky for no reason.
3. Efficient data storage is the key to cost cuts and crucial insights
The hoarding of data is crucial for one simple reason- it helps enterprises with insights.
Enterprises can study their customer’s data and find out their purchase patterns and their shopping habits. Furthermore, they can also find out if their current infrastructure is useful to the customers and if something needs to be changed and tweaked.
All of this helps enterprises in giving their customers a better experience and devising business plans to target them. But the amount of data that is received every day by these enterprises is mind-boggling, and they have to be smart while storing it. Enterprises need to extend their storage and move their data from the Hot status to Warm and Cold statues as the data ages and move it to physical disks.
This way, the most relevant and latest data is always in the cloud, and aged data is transferred to the back. This data can then be studied for insights.
4. Scalability is the key to growth
The business world is always changing. New technologies are released, new trends come into play, and if an enterprise plays its cards right, it can not only survive but thrive in the tumultuous business waters.
But with success comes the need to level up and expand.
Enterprises need a scalable environment that can not only provide the same quality services to all the new customers but doesn’t compromise on the quality of the services offered to the old customers. It should be able to handle the new load on storage and processing sides efficiently.
So enterprises are always looking for Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) partners that provide scalable services that can meet the increased demand without any dips in the quality of the services.
These IaaS providers should also give enterprise enhanced cybersecurity services as well since the load of the environment has increased, and so has its vulnerability. Giving them business tools to better rearrange their current business process as they expand is also a necessity.
5. Monitoring systems and applications is vital for your infrastructure’s health
In multi and hybrid clouds, systems, applications, and processes are interlinked by their functionality, utility, and sometimes even by their vulnerability. If one application goes down, the entire system can come to a stop, and the business process that it was dedicated to will stop as well.
So constant end-to-end checks of your systems and applications are necessary for the health of your infrastructure. It happens too often that a system might be pinging, but an essential app on it might not be, so monitoring of systems and applications is required.
Automated health checks and heartbeat monitoring are required, and any problem found should be immediately addressed.
Your infrastructure is only as healthy as its separate organs are.
6. Cyber Security is still one of the top priorities
Security is always a major concern whenever data is concerned. Large enterprises are often victims of hacking and other cyber-crimes simply because they have so much to be stolen from, and their infrastructures are so big that there usually are some minor bugs that can be exploited.
So having sound cyber-security for your cloud is probably the most important thing. But the old reactive and threat-oriented approach to cybersecurity is not enough for an intelligent cloud.
Intelligent clouds require a proactive approach where your system is not reacting to a threat, but it is already ready for it. Instead of being threat-driven, it has to be predictive and anticipate threats and take measures to prevent it from hitting the environment rather than getting hit and taking countermeasures.
These proactive measures need to be applied across the cloud, from the network to user data and company apps so that a hacker cannot exploit any weakness in your cloud.
Also, these security measures can help your compliance with the data-security regulations of a country.
7. Your organization needs to change with your technology
On-premise environments are mostly looked after and governed by in-house employees. Different employees have different roles and responsibilities. But when you migrate your on-premises set-up to a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud, those roles and responsibilities will have to be changed.
The biggest challenge for organizations during this migration period is to decide who does what?
In a cloud environment, those roles that were once held by in-house people will now be held by other people. This will require a change in roles, it will require a change in the current operational approach of your IT wing; you will have to train people to use cloud efficiently, create support processes and operational documents.
In large enterprises, the business aspect of the company should be in close contact with the IT aspect about issues like goals, budget, and governance because a lot of IT decisions are business decisions as well.
Also Read: Cloud Migration Strategy: Driving Your Business Growth
Conclusion
Enterprises are working hard and fast to move their operations to the cloud. But some are doing it the right way, and some aren’t. The trick is to know what will work for your enterprise because your business and enterprise needs are different than the rest.
An intelligent cloud prevents data loss, decreases downtime, and helps you in tracking software changes. Since the entire infrastructure is on the cloud, it can be accessed from multiple access points, and because you have bullet-proof cybersecurity measures, these access points are secure as well.
Migrating to the cloud increases the agility and productivity of your business, and at the same time, it helps you in working efficiently. Cost cuts are substantial since you no longer have to invest so much on maintaining on-premise servers, too.
So beware of the pitfalls and keep in mind the points mentioned above to make sure that you get the best out of your cloud migration investment.
