In recent years as some businesses have gone “all in” and embraced the cloud completely, eschewing on-premises infrastructure, many businesses have taken a more cautious approach of leveraging cloud computing only where it brings significant benefit without escalating risk. This approach of utilizing a combination of both traditional on-premises IT and public cloud services is called the hybrid cloud approach.

The emergence of the global pandemic, however, is starting to have an impact on companies’ decisions for maintaining portions of their IT infrastructure on-premises instead of migrating everything to the cloud. To gain more insight into the trends emerging in this area, I recently sat down with Jeff Valentine, the CTO of CloudCheckr, a popular cloud management and governance tool for federal agencies and large enterprises.

“For many organizations, COVID-19 has accelerated their IT modernization efforts, which includes cloud migration. At the same time, however, it’s crucial that organizations are smart about software implementation and don’t sacrifice security in their effort to scale up cloud-based resources. For organizations that maintain most, or all, of their infrastructure on-premises, the transition to remote work meant that some processes and applications that employees rely on wouldn’t be possible for telecommuting. To offset this, companies began modernizing their technology stacks and migrating to the cloud, which has further led the industry away from on-premise technology.”

I asked Jeff next what he thought was the best line of approach for a business to take if they want to reduce the on-premises portion of their hybrid infrastructure and begin migrating more of their workloads to a public cloud. Jeff’s response was straightforward and helpful.

“Migrating workloads to the cloud often occurs in two phases, and too often we see companies taking the (easy) first step without the (more complex but more impactful) second step. For example, an on-premises server can be migrated to the cloud with the help of many tools and service providers in relatively short order and with very little disruption or risk, but the result won’t be optimized for the best benefits of the cloud unless organizations take the next step. Is the application running on the right size of infrastructure? Has storage been optimized to take advantage of some of the cloud’s capabilities for archiving and cold storage? Has the infrastructure surrounding the application been configured to ensure that the performance is monitored, and the workloads are secured? Can the application be redesigned to take advantage of serverless technologies to operate more efficiently and at a much lower cost? There are so many benefits to taking that next step that organizations should seek out managed service providers and software that helps them do that.”

Read the full article on How the Rise of Remote Work is Accelerating Cloud Migrations.