Cloud Enablement is the process of building a highly effective cloud environment. That still sounds non-specific, so what it really consists of is cloud migration strategy and readiness, cloud migration, cloud governance, and DevOps.
You may think this comes out of the box for a cloud environment. It does, sort of, if you know how to put all the pieces together.
Cloud Readiness
The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) is a great starting point to start exploring the shifts an organization will need to make when trading hardware based computing for cloud computing. Read more about it on our Cloud Adoption and Strategy page. Briefly, the following is a list of differences:
- Trade capital expense for operational expense
- Benefit from economies of scale
- Make agile capacity decisions
- Increase business speed and agility
- Go global in minutes
- Stop spending money on data centers
Cloud Migration Strategy
Once your organization is ready to switch to a cloud model it is important to understand what your current computing resources are and how they are connected. For example, applications usually depend on databases Another example is often other applications depend on Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software.
Cloud Migration
There are many ways to migrate to the cloud, from “lift and shift” to “modernization”. There are many tools and companies that specialize in lift and shift migrations. These usually also double as a backup tool for on-premises computing resources. Lift and shift generally will not save much money (if any) or provide many of the benefits of cloud computing. On the other hand, app modernization involves much more work. It is the process of re-architecting and rebuilding your applications to take advantage of the cloud computing model.
Cloud Governance
There are many definitions of cloud governance, but we define it as the process of defining and creating policies to control costs, minimize security risks, and improve efficiency. This breaks down into cost management, security, reliability, and operational efficiency. This topic deserves more than a short explanation, so look for more from us on this in the future. Until then, our page on Cloud Governance covers some of the resources AWS provides.
DevOps
DevOps is the basis of operational efficiency. It allows you to quickly and efficiently build and deploy code to production, and rollback if necessary. Since it is automated, this happens without a lot of manual, error prone steps. It also allows you to monitor your systems for signs of problems and quickly identify and fix it.
If you are interested in cloud enablement or any of the topics here, please reach out and schedule a call with us to learn more.
