Enterprise IaaS Migration: Cloud Readiness Tips from Relus

In spite of cloud adoption speed bumps, ranging from security concerns to expense management, public cloud migration continues to gain velocity. The need for reliable, expert vendor partners is more important than ever. CloudCheckr offers a comprehensive cloud management solution for organizations to keep their cloud in check. However, often, the devil is in the details: for organizations to truly optimize the public cloud, migration partners with expertise can help ensure a smooth cloud initiative from the start.

Relus Cloud, a CloudCheckr partner and an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, helps enterprise businesses plan and execute successful cloud deployments. Through meaningful business assessments, tailored cloud strategies, comprehensive roadmaps, and cloud training solutions, Relus enables organizations to leverage AWS to its full potential. Below, Relus Director of Cloud Consulting, Jon Hoover, shares advice for enterprises as they prepare to move their business to AWS.

Assessing Cloud Readiness

Organizations are progressively moving their core infrastructure operations and business critical applications into cloud computing environments. As with all innovative initiatives, there are inherent risks associated with this shift in business demand. Organizations are building their business process around the capabilities of their technology platform. Any change or initiative for new infrastructure will require a methodical approach, thorough planning, and a substantial use-case.

The Cloud Readiness Assessment was created to evaluate an organization’s potential to function in the cloud and suggest modifications where needed to mitigate risks and improve agility. Below are the key components involved in evaluating organizational readiness:

1. Migration Planning

The planning portion of migrations evaluates environments and infrastructure to form a detailed project plan and business roadmap. It’s important to consider the applications and data being migrated during this phase, as legacy applications may complicate the process more than newer technology.

2. Migration Optimization

Optimization maximizes cloud platform benefits over time and enhance business agility, flexibility, and stability—enabling them to get to market faster and be more competitive. Large systems make it difficult to escalate and respond quickly, reversing any additional agility benefits of the cloud. A thorough review of the application architecture will confirm the necessity of moving specific applications to the cloud.

3. Migration Costs

Before migration begins, it is important to analyze and determine initial size requirements for environments running in a cloud platform. A cost tool is able to assess your environment for an overall estimate; however, nuances and varying details will sway costs as the project continues. Discussing pricing for your specific environment on the front end will save headaches down the road.

4. Tools and Processes

Review current toolset and methods related to provisioning, maintaining, and monitoring cloud-based services. Knowing what exists in your overall environment is critical to facilitating successful management and optimization.

5. Cost Management

Review tools and processes designed to help control costs in cloud based scenarios. Once you’ve migrated, multi-account visibility can be a challenge when it comes to allocating costs and optimizing budget across teams—it’s helpful to plan for this before you begin.

6. Team Organization, Staffing, and Training

Review current organization of operations & engineering and recommend changes and structure based on a model of cloud computing. Ensure you have a plan for onboarding and, especially, governing your cloud initiative once it’s off the ground.

7. Best Practice Adoption

AWS values security and streamlined operations, so adopting security standards and best practices that are backed by cloud providers and proven in other implementations can be a good start. Identifying a proven cloud management platform like CloudCheckr can help derive insights and prioritize actions from best practice checks.

Ensure That Your Enterprise IaaS Migration Has Succeeded

Once you’ve migrated, you’ll want to make sure that your cloud environment meets the standards of the AWS Well-Architected Review. If you’re not sure whether you’re on the right track, contact CloudCheckr for a free Cloud Check Up.