Finding the right strategy for your way to the cloud

– Abstract –

This article is about finding the right strategy if you want to empower your business with cloud computing. It’s written for those of you who are still new to this topic and want to get a first sight through the dense cloud mystery. After reading you should have gained an orientation on how to start your first cloud project and a basic knowledge of the most important buzzwords of the industry.

It’s stormy outside

It’s been over a decade now that Amazon was stirring up the market with their web services and cloud computing is now more mainstream than ever. What for many people started with file-sharing- and backup-services like Dropbox or company internal NAS-systems, quickly transformed into a trending global topic. Why should you always upgrade local hardware and storage to stay competitive if you can have the same or even greater performance with shared resources, reduced costs and accessibility from everywhere?

Some understood that earlier than others and can already harvest the fruits from their work – and some, hopefully not you – should seriously think about protecting their house because the storm is not over yet! With the introduction of cloud gaming services like GeForce Now and the start of projects from the major players in the market, it starts to be clear that cloud computing is not just a hype, quite the reverse, anything seems to be possible and any upcoming business transformations should consider the opportunities of cloud computing for their needs. And who knows, maybe one day you can even sell your computing power as a part of the worldwide cloud like it’s been introduced by crypto-currency miners or solar tech companies?

Faster, Greater, Higher! The sky’s the limit!

So as enough time has passed that the first CTOs and CIOs can look back to their early experiences with moving to cloud services, we can wrap up some key facts if you’re still looking for a few good arguments which may convince you and your team for moving to the cloud.

Scalability with minor effort

• Overwhelming traffic is not a show stopper anymore
• Auto scaling infrastructure is auto money for your pocket!
• Reduce the multi region infrastructure challenge

Security

• Cloud storage takes less risks than lost devices!
• Stop to worry about underlying infrastructure security & maintenance
• The disaster can come! Well proven Disaster Recovery Systems of great
  cloud providers are probably better than yours!

Speed & Performance

• Increase your server-side performance on-demand as you go
• Handle request peaks without costly overprovisioning your hardware

Reduced Costs = Greater Profit

• Pay-as-you-go is better than buy-and-deprecate!
• Financial advantages through transformation from CAPEX to OPEX
• Makes your financial model a lot easier to plan and calculate
• High chance to reduce your Time to Market 
• Emerging markets can perhaps make you even fly higher

Agility & User Experience

• Stop your team from leaving their key competences
• Increase your team performance with the latest collaboration tools
• Satisfy your team by giving them a state-of-the-art feeling
• Give more freedom for physical appearance

Ecological Footprint

• Less eWaste for deprecated hardware
• Savings on power supply and emissions

And if you’re doing it right, you earn a lot of FLEXIBILITY which is nowadays more important than ever! Our technological environment changes so fast that you may be outdated before you finish your project – ok, probably not that fast – but you should be prepared! If your cloud provider can’t handle your SLA or gets outdated by himself, you may move on to a new provider but be aware: cloud providers want to keep you as a customer, for sure! How that may end up badly for you we’ll discuss in the next section.

Pitfalls you better leave for others

So if you’re convinced now by the advantages of the cloud, we reveal you some pain points where others have been stumbling, so keep them in mind and don’t make these mistakes again!

Readiness of Organization
One of the greatest mistakes you can do while dreaming of your cloud project is to underestimate the know-how that is necessary to do the job right. Many teams stumbled over the fact that their ideas and plans were great but they forgot about the people who finally have to do the job. Your change management team also has to be aware that going to the cloud can also have a negative impact on other teams, so other teams in your company may start fighting against that change. Imagine for example your customers have now direct access to your order- and payment system, will your sales team like that? Your change can also impact your hierarchical structure and long cherished employees lose their major value for the team. So it’s probably likely that not everybody in your organization will like your project, be aware of that!

Readiness of Application
It doesn’t matter if you’re developing a new or transforming an existing application, you have to keep the drawbacks in mind that can come along with cloud services. Too many technical leaders made the mistake of thinking a simple lift-and-shift strategy will work out and they had to learn by hard that some refactoring is always necessary. This can start by underestimating the threshold of your cloud provider, continuing with disregarding upcoming latency that destroys your user experience or dependency libraries that are restricted to be used in the cloud (rare, but reported). So you better make a new concept first and think from the very beginning which components can be reused in which way. Think about your build steps, your deployment, your test environment, your architecture, current infrastructure, previous concurrency issues, clusters you want to use – convince yourself first and not later!

Data Privacy & Compliance
Especially with the release of the new data privacy regulations from 2018, many companies got messed up and reported big question marks on how to continue with their services. So you can be lucky to start your cloud project after this disrupting wave but you shouldn’t think that the current data privacy agreements will last forever, this was rather just the beginning of regulations that were missed since the beginning of our digital lifestyle. Data privacy for your customers and data protection imposed by your company compliance will harden your way to the cloud – that’s for sure!

Remember your Business Idea!
It doesn’t matter if you start a new project or lift some existing functionality to the cloud, if it creates advantages, any motivated employee will create further and further ideas how to improve and scale the impact of your cloud movement. So if you impress your environment, you can likely be sure that it doesn’t take a long time until the first ideas from other teams or team members land on your desk! So keep your primary business goals in mind and finish them first before you start working on other issues. If you’re a technical leader or you’re the one who pushes the cloud movement forward, take the advice to reflect yourself frequently and check if the tasks that you’ve created also have a value to your business. Too many become starry-eyed for cloud transformations and lift them to a holy-grail, which it isn’t for sure! So think twice if the current steps are really necessary and profitable for you and your team!

Vendor Lock-In
It’s too sad to be true but in reality it’s a fact. We have two strongly diverging mindsets in our industry. There are the ones who believe everything should be free and open sourced and the others try to catch you in their cage and won’t ever let you go. So you got to be aware of the fact that it’s common under cloud providers that they will try to trap you with special offers, extra support, personal training sessions and individual implementation opportunities just to keep you as a customer as long as possible. So if you start to implement services based on proprietary interfaces it will be harder for you to relocate your codebase one day. Or if you build up a special knowledge customized to their services, you may wake up one day and realize that this knowledge is now worthless. So in other words, if their ship goes down, you’ll go down too! So be aware to avoid a vendor lock-in as much as you can!

Cloud Provider Evaluation
Especially those who are new to this topic may stumble across a thing called SLA (Service Level Agreement) which defines the contract you sign with your cloud provider. If you don’t know exactly what it contains and where the borders of your cooperation are, you may run into trouble sooner or later. So it’s a good advice to get somebody for your team who was able to collect some experience in the cloud environment before and protects you from making the same mistakes that others did. It’s not about missing some contract details, it’s more about finding the right values and parameters that fit to your application and finally to your business case. As long as your project works fine you’ll probably never get in touch with your SLA that much, but once you got your customers or your boss in your neck, if there is an unexpected downtime, drastically rising costs due to a miss-configuration or a security lack, or even a disaster with a never ending recovery time, you will understand why knowing your SLA details is important. Take it as a good advice, especially at the beginning of your cooperation, that measurement and control is better than relying on trust. So the job is to monitor and measure as much as you can until you get a good feeling of what’s going on and how much responsibility you can take for it. Expect the unexpected!

Your guide through the jungle

So as far as you are familiar with the greatest advantages and biggest show stoppers now, we can start to create a cloud strategy that fits to your needs. Get your weapons locked and loaded and follow me through the jungle!

What do you want to create?

Remember your business goals and remember how others have lost the trail and you don’t want that the same happens to you, right? So define your project and especially your project scope precisely. What do you want to create? What is what you want to offer to your customer? Who is your customer and what do they really need? Think about your use-cases and match them accordingly. To make it a little bit more confusing, maybe you’ve heard about XaaS or *aaS which is one of the most blown up cloud buzzwords ever! What had once started with Software as a Service (SaaS), which basically means software delivered by cloud services, later transformed into a term that is almost used for any kind of service. Firewall as a Service, Payment as a Service, Analytics as a Service and even non- technological ones. But the idea behind the services-oriented model is great! So if you want to market your later product right, think in terms of services! Remember how you changed your business model from CAPEX to OPEX and your future customers want to have that too! They don’t want to buy a product, they have a goal and they are looking for the right service to reach their target as fast and as best as they can. And that’s a fact for any kind of customer. So you are serving them your best to let them reach their best!
They other way around you have to think of the same terms for your goals. But this is a matter of your skills, compliance and amount of responsibility you want to share. Netflix for example thought they could fly high and even higher, so they built up their own infrastructure and data centers until they had to realize that they can never get this job done any better than Amazon does. From that point on they focus on what they really want to do: delivering awesome series! So think about the services you want to deliver, what kind of services would be a help for you, short term and long term! Imagine your project growth stages from time to time, where is your starting point and where do you finally want to get and find a match with a cloud provider that has all the abilities you need for your scale.

If you’re willing to create services that are mainly for corporate users, think of a private cloud with outsourced hosting facilities which is in fact technically nothing else than a restricted public cloud for your private usage. If your compliance or your business case doesn’t force you to keep your data in-house, guard it with a virtual private network access (VPN) and you are ready to go. If you once need to open some services for public usage you can still transform it to a hybrid cloud by removing the according restrictions or routing it through a public cloud.

Checklist

To not leave you unarmed, we’ve created a checklist that you may consider at the start of your cloud project. Critics are always welcome, if you’ve noticed some missing points or made different experiences throughout the years, let us know and write it in the comments down below!

1. What’s my business goal? Which requirements does it take?
2. How can I accelerate my time to market?
   Is the market ready for my concept?
3. How ready is my application or existing architecture?
4. Is there a need for refactoring? Does it also consider potential cloud
5. drawbacks like latency, downtime, noisy neighbours, migration, licenses and so on?
6. How ready is my organization and team? Who can do the job?
7. Will it change my business model? Does it disrupt my team? 
8. Which restrictions do exist? Compliance? Security?
   Data privacy policies?
9. Where do I need help in terms of services? Long term? Short term?
10. Where do I want to grow? How much responsibility can I share?
11. Does the SLA match my requirements? How about Disaster Recovery?
12. Do the project requirements match my budget? Can it be done at the given time?

And as a final word: Don’t over engineer and don’t over manage it all! Keep it simple and straightforward and learn from your mistakes. Never lay back, be proactive, expect the unexpected and create your plan b – than you’re prepared for whatever it takes 😀

References

Author: Cloud Technology Partners, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company
Publication Date: July 21, 2016
Title: Five things every CEO should know before going to the cloud
Retrieved August 08, 2020 from:
https://www.cloudtp.com/doppler/5-things-every-ceo-know-going-cloud/

Author: Jeremy Cook, Cloud Academy
Publication Date: September 2019, 2019
Title: Cloud Migration Risks & Benefits
Retrieved August 09, 2020 from:
https://cloudacademy.com/blog/cloud-migration-benefits-risks/

Author: Sharad Acharya, Ace Cloud Hosting
Publication Date: April 05, 2019
Title: Things to look out while choosing a cloud service provider
Retrieved August 09, 2020 from:
https://www.acecloudhosting.com/blog/choosing-cloud-service-provider/

Author: Eze Castle Integration
Publication Date: January 21, 2020
Title: 6 Common cloud mistakes and how to avoid them
Retrieved August 09, 2020 from:
https://www.eci.com/blog/15706-6-common-cloud-mistakes-and-how-to-avoid-them.html

Author: Stefan Luber, Cloud-Computing Insider
Publication Date: August 16, 2017
Title: Was ist eine private Cloud?
Retrieved August 12, 2020 from:
https://www.cloudcomputing-insider.de/was-ist-eine-private-cloud-a-631415/