Cloud computing infrastructure: Is it really as beneficial as it makes itself out to be?

At this high point in the media cycle, it might seem odd to give advice on cloud adoption.

Much of the industry, after all, regard the public cloud as an established area with well-defined practices and numerous achievements. With more than 63% of all workforces in the cloud, there is plenty of recommendations and heaps of assistance to be found that can help new players develop and implement their cloud transformations

Despite all the information available, companies are still struggling to reach their cloud Utopia. Except for the fact that the COVID pandemic is currently affecting businesses around the world, many companionable cloud migration projects are sputtering and stalling in their effort to manipulate the pledge of on-demand elastic computing into tangible.

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Yes, we have copious amounts of literature explaining how to architect cloud services “well” and how dynamic storage architectures and network topologies can be safely engineered. But there is still very little information about how to structure your organization, and how to utilize business strategies that support the possibilities that extreme virtualization brings.

We also see businesses constructing fleets of resources that will be, at best, expensive to maintain and, at worst, untenable. Organizations are generating technological debt rather quickly in their rush to migrate into the cloud. They create one-off, difficult-to-replicate systems and fail to enforce the most rudimentary quality controls on those resources.

In the long term, these resources will absorb much more in operating costs than they will ever be saved by switching from an on-site data center to a cloud service provider.

In this article, we ‘re going to try to point out some of the common mistakes that we’ve seen companies make in transitioning to the cloud and then offer a possible alternative.

Why is cloud success so evasive?

Over the last ten years, we have seen this pattern play out a number of times. A new technology. promising the future comes along. Industry experts draw quadrants and then choose the winners. Immediately businesses presume that they can avoid the extra effort of picking up a new practice by going along with the chosen winner.

They think that the business benefits will accumulate very naturally if they just choose the right IT outsourcing companion and if then follow through by successfully managing the associated costs. Unfortunately, this is never the case.

Businesses that achieve success with technological advances do so by adjusting to the changes within their organization, their operating model and engineering capabilities in their new paradigm. In many cases, they have to make adjustments to their business model as well as their network infrastructure, all while maintaining the highest network and data security standards.

One way this fallacy occurs in the case of the cloud is in the assumption that the cloud is merely an alternative type of infrastructure. They wrongly believe that cloud becomes the obligation of the networks or infrastructure divisions that had managed the data centers and physical networks before the migration. But the cloud is not just a form of virtual hardware infrastructure. It is 100% software.

Selecting the best cloud services provider today has stopped being just a matter of quick access and user-friendliness. Nowadays, we use cloud storage for just about anything: from sharing personal photos, to our favorite movies, to professional documents and school projects.

The same organizations that hand over their cloud deployment to an infrastructure or operations team will never think of handing over a major, multi-year software development project to the same team.

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But that’s what cloud deployment is: a massive, multidisciplinary endeavor to deliver software that serves almost every business need you can think of. This includes a range of services from DDoS protection to email marketing automation, both often forgotten about despite their financial impact: businesses lose, on average, $120,000 per DDoS attack, but they gain roughly $38 of new business for every $1 spent.

Migrating to a multi-cloud environment can bring many benefits. It’s a common mistake for companies, in their haste to migrate to the cloud – and which restricts potential long-term benefits – to become profoundly and inescapably intertwined with a single cloud service provider. Organizations are increasingly utilizing multiple private and public clouds to redistribute their software or applications, to prevent vendor lock-in and manipulation, and among other things, best-of-breed solutions.

The major vendors have achieved relative consistency across a core range of offerings and are actively fighting to win an ever-greater portion of the market. Their fees, the services they provide, their safety features, and their business models all enable cloud customers to use more and more services and entice them to take advantage of the special or otherwise differentiating features of the service provider.

Inherently these exclusive features are hard to port from one service provider to another. And single-vendor entrapment also comes with a high level of risk – primarily by putting the decision-making capabilities squarely in the hands of the service provider.

The four corners of successful cloud adoption

We have observed that the most successful cloud migration strategies go well beyond replatforming and implement a 360-degree approach to the change instead. When considering infrastructure alone, you may be fortunate enough to reduce costs alone, but to see an impact on business revenue, market share, or innovation, the approach should be broader.

Any business has only taken its first step of many when they decide to move from on-site infrastructure to cloud hosting. Maximizing the gains from switching to the cloud while retaining the highest cybersecurity standards requires attention to the following four distinct corners:

Technical superiority

Cloud is software and in order to effectively utilize cloud necessitates an investment in software engineering capabilities. Cloud-native engineering is more than merely harnessing the services of a service provider, it means adapting some basic beliefs about adaptability and application design.

The Infrastructure code requires the same attention to detail than you would apply to customer-facing platforms. Successful software delivery endeavors should produce value for the company soon and regularly. Its implementation is no different.

Self-service features

Cloud vendors have democratic access to hosting environments through their API. For example, cloud-based accounting software can offer essential self-service features such as syncing your business expenses, organizing your income and expenses, automatically creating invoices for customers or clients, and other bookkeeping tasks.

This convenience of access should be passed on to business developers if companies expect the productivity changes that the cloud provides. Internal self-service cloud systems should be designed in order to facilitate the production of customer-centered digital products.

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Positioning autonomy

The transition from a specialist-managed and remotely distributed environment of physical resources to a software-defined network, device, storage, and support is a significant disruption to any organization. The distribution teams now establish and manage their own hosting environments. The shift to the left includes security, conformity, strategic alignment, and support responsibilities.

Service provider choice

Each company needs a multi-cloud strategy. That strategy could be to accept the risk of reliance on single providers, in return for their productivity and favorable pricing. But rather than a series of involuntary acts, it must be a deliberate decision. It also pays to be aware of the specific services each supplier offers so that you can choose from a range of options instead of being bound to a single supplier for all your needs.

Eventually, we encourage anyone who thinks of moving to the cloud to look at it through a tech lens – and to embrace certain good engineering practices, associated through agile software development.