Managing your workloads in the cloud the right way
According to the Cisco Global Cloud Index, 78 percent of all workloads will be processed in cloud-ready data centers by 2018. These workloads include both critical and secondary applications, such as email, collaboration, ERP, document sharing and CRM.
While moving workloads to the cloud can lower your costs and make you more agile, it also poses a number of visibility and security concerns. If these workloads aren’t secure, available and resilient, they will ruin your business. So how can you take advantage of the cloud while maintaining visibility into your workloads and ensuring that your applications are performing?
To make sure you are managing your workloads the right way, make sure you are working with the right advisor that will understand your needs and will be able to help you set up, monitor and manage efficiencies, while reduce your costs.
Anyone can talk about the new style of IT. However, to transform your business, you need a provider who can help you manage the old style of IT while moving to a more agile way of managing your business. So, here are 3 best practices I’ve learned from migrating workloads and managing cloud infrastructures for some of the companies I’ve worked with.
- Measure, analyze and understand your applications
An analysis of your applications can define requirements at the right level to evaluate prospective cloud endpoints that can meet the current and forecasted demand for your workload patterns. Some other considerations include whether or not the cloud provider has the ability to support a multi-cloud architecture which in turn supports the various workload types for your enterprise.
- Refresh corporate security policies
Security is the number one challenge, risk, and concern when moving to the cloud. So the starting point is to really understand what your security policies are and compare them to what may be the impact of moving into a cloud environment. The first step is to make sure you are still following all policies no matter what the architecture or cloud provider. Then, create a plan around classification and how you’re going to allow access to the data from appropriate applications.
- Rethink the IT skills you’ll need and plan to build accordingly
When deciding to adopt cloud, it’s key to understand what skills your team will need and how the demands of individual jobs will change with cloud. Look for cloud providers whose resources are fully committed to providing cloud management, remote infrastructure management and service desk support to enterprise clients 24/7.
Additionally, make sure that your provider’s operation centers are staffed with highly skilled, certified engineers able to see the bigger picture and provide recommendations beyond the devices being managed. Least, but not last the cloud solutions provider should have clear service-level agreements with well-defined response and resolution times spelled out, and they should be able to be customized as needed for each client situation.
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