Best Cloud Platform for Your Business: Even by the most basic measures, it is clear that cloud computing has become indispensable to most businesses. Ninety-four per cent of businesses already use some sort of cloud service, and by 2021, it is expected that the public cloud infrastructure supporting those businesses will have grown by 35 per cent.
However, many still find the idea of moving to the cloud to be intimidating. While some business processes may have moved to the cloud, many still utilise on-premises hardware because it is more comfortable and secure. As an added complication, some may be unaware of the advantages of cloud computing for businesses, while others may believe that the hassle involved in transitioning to cloud computing is not worthwhile.
In an earlier post, we gave you an idea of what it might take to get your company set up for success in the cloud by explaining how the process of cloud adoption can unfold.
Justifying cloud computing is essential in developing the metrics, milestones, and objectives necessary for a smooth transition to the cloud.
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One would be negligent not to mention some of the major cloud players when considering the “why” of cloud adoption. Even though there are many, this article will focus on two: Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. We can better understand the advantages of widespread cloud adoption if we examine the most fundamental features of these cloud computing services.
Cloud Migration: What You Need to Know
It’s crucial to take stock of your organization’s infrastructure before diving into the advantages of cloud migration. There are a number of factors to flesh out when deciding which cloud platform is the best fit for your firm.
Is your current usage of Azure and AWS roughly equal?
In order to successfully advocate for the adoption or expansion of a cloud platform inside your business, you should have extensive expertise working within that platform. Sticking with what you know can be beneficial if your company is already using some Azure or AWS services. If, for instance, your company uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to host its workloads, then your staff may be aware of AWS and its capabilities and quirks. Start/Stop and Reservation Cost Management Strategies Your company may already have processes in place for managing AWS workloads.
Also, if your company is already using Microsoft 365 or Azure for its cloud computing needs, you may be able to save money by taking advantage of cross-product licencing and services, such as Azure AD Premium licencing and familiarity with Azure services and products.
Existing Windows Server, SQL Server, etc. licences that could be used with Azure?
Microsoft’s ability to take advantage of its vast on-premises IT product range is a major competitive advantage for the company in the cloud computing market. Significant cost reductions can be realised by businesses who already own licences for products like Windows and SQL Server and take advantage of the bring-your-own-license benefit offered by Software Assurance. AWS does offer similar cost-cutting measures occasionally, but Microsoft has a substantial advantage.
What are the most significant gains your group can anticipate from making the transition to the cloud?
Most importantly, your firm must determine how migrating to the cloud can improve operations. We’ll talk about some of the big-picture solutions to this puzzle.
Even by the most basic measures, it is clear that cloud computing has become indispensable to most businesses. Ninety-four per cent of businesses already use some sort of cloud service, and by 2021, it is expected that the public cloud infrastructure supporting those businesses will have grown by 35 per cent.
However, many still find the idea of moving to the cloud to be intimidating. While some business processes may have moved to the cloud, many still utilise on-premises hardware because it is more comfortable and secure. As an added complication, some may be unaware of the advantages of cloud computing for businesses, while others may believe that the hassle involved in transitioning to cloud computing is not worthwhile.
In an earlier post, we gave you an idea of what it might take to get your company set up for success in the cloud by explaining how the process of cloud adoption can unfold.
Justifying cloud computing is essential in developing the metrics, milestones, and objectives necessary for a smooth transition to the cloud.
One would be negligent not to mention some of the major cloud players when considering the “why” of cloud adoption. Even though there are many, this article will focus on two: Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. We can better understand the advantages of widespread cloud adoption if we examine the most fundamental features of these cloud computing services.
Cloud Migration: What You Need to Know
It’s crucial to take stock of your organization’s infrastructure before diving into the advantages of cloud migration. There are a number of factors to flesh out when deciding which cloud platform is the best fit for your firm.
Is your current usage of Azure and AWS roughly equal?
In order to successfully advocate for the adoption or expansion of a cloud platform inside your business, you should have extensive expertise working within that platform. Sticking with what you know can be beneficial if your company is already using some Azure or AWS services. If, for instance, your company uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to host its workloads, then your staff may be aware of AWS and its capabilities and quirks. Start/Stop and Reservation Cost Management Strategies Your company may already have processes in place for managing AWS workloads.
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Also, if your company is already using Microsoft 365 or Azure for its cloud computing needs, you may be able to save money by taking advantage of cross-product licencing and services, such as Azure AD Premium licencing and familiarity with Azure services and products.
Existing Windows Server, SQL Server, etc. licences that could be used with Azure?
Microsoft’s ability to take advantage of its vast on-premises IT product range is a major competitive advantage for the company in the cloud computing market. Significant cost reductions can be realised by businesses who already own licences for products like Windows and SQL Server and take advantage of the bring-your-own-license benefit offered by Software Assurance. AWS does offer similar cost-cutting measures occasionally, but Microsoft has a substantial advantage.
What are the most significant gains your group can anticipate from making the transition to the cloud?
Most importantly, your firm must determine how migrating to the cloud can improve operations. We’ll talk about some of the big-picture solutions to this puzzle.
Principal Gains from Migrating to the Cloud
While there are many positive outcomes that might result from a move to the cloud, a few “big picture” benefits capture the essence of how cloud adoption can benefit your business in the short and long term.
Faster Business Results
On-premises hardware may be more comfortable and convenient, but it also has the potential to severely hamper and limit the progress of your business. On-premises servers, storage, and networking equipment require lengthy, expensive procurement cycles and strict specifications.
Speeds can be boosted by migrating to the cloud. By moving to the cloud, you can eliminate procurement bottlenecks and potentially reduce the time it takes to meet the IT needs of strategically important business projects from weeks or months to days or even hours. When you migrate to the cloud, you may spend less time waiting and more time developing, two things that are crucial to the growth of any firm.
Don’t waste money on expensive start-up costs.
Using the cloud also lets you pay for what you actually use. Investment in an on-premises infrastructure can run into thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, and careful capacity planning is essential to avoid the substantial underutilization of resources. The cloud’s pay-as-you-go pricing model and scalability make it ideal for meeting the ever-changing demands placed on a company’s IT setup. Without worrying about exhausting your current computing capacity or incurring exorbitant costs to expand your on-premises server footprint, your team can focus on improving services and innovating.
The Azure and AWS reservation and pricing models are very similar, with some minor distinctions.
With Azure reservations, businesses can save money by prepaying for a set amount of time’s worth of a certain kind of Azure resource. Azure also provides the Azure Hybrid Benefit, which is an additional cost-cutting measure. As an Azure Hybrid Benefit, you can run SQL Server, Windows Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux from your on-premises Software Assurance licences. Using this method, you may make use of the cloud’s features while reducing your overall cost of ownership. You can also choose to subscribe to a service. Programs like Azure Dev/Test and CSP (Cloud Solution Provider) can save you money on non-production workloads. As such, we provide a monthly discount on Azure spending for customers who subscribe to Azure through Affirma’s CSP programme, allowing you to further lower the expenses of cloud-hosted production workloads.
To help you budget for discounts on AWS EC2, AWS Fargate, and AWS Lambda, AWS provides Savings Plans in addition to its reservation system. In exchange for agreeing to a minimum hourly spend, you’ll receive a discount on all instances of the service for which you’ve signed up. This allows businesses to save money compared to the pay-as-you-go model and substantially streamlines their approach to expense control.
Both platforms have a pay-as-you-go pricing model, thus strategies that automatically start and terminate instances that don’t need to be running all the time can also result in substantial cost savings.
Integration Abilities
Another perk of moving to the cloud is that it can be easily integrated with any tools and systems you already use. If you put in the time and effort upfront, you may set up a fully or partially cloud-based ecosystem of products that meets your needs.
Azure is designed to work seamlessly with on-premises Microsoft environments. Azure integration is not restricted to Microsoft products and services; however, Microsoft does provide features and capabilities that help businesses get the most out of their cloud investments. For instance, Microsoft provides Azure AD Connect, which bridges Azure AD and on-premises Active Directory deployments, Azure ATP, which enhances security posture on-premises, and SCCM co-management, which enables cooperation between SCCM and Intune. These can supplement your in-house toolkit in many ways.
Similar possibilities for integrating and improving conventional on-premises capabilities are available through AWS. Security Hub can combine a wide variety of third-party products to provide a unified, cloud-based perspective on security, and services like AD Connector make it easier to extend directory services to the cloud.
Using PaaS to Simplify Management
One of the main advantages of cloud computing is that it allows you to scale while maintaining flexibility. Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions are useful for automating routine IT processes and streamlining capacity planning as your database expands and changes over time. This is true whether you use Azure or AWS. As a result, your staff will be able to devote more time to value-adding activities and less time to maintenance tasks like patching, backing up and tweaking.
Examples of available PaaS relational database services are Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. It’s true that AWS’s Amazon RDS for Oracle, MariaDB, and Amazon Aurora is distinct from Azure’s SQL Database, yet they both serve the same purpose of lowering the burden of routine maintenance. By using hot patching to deploy over 80% of SQL fixes to the database without affecting end-users and automated failover to SQL replicas to minimise the impact of patches which do require a reboot, Azure SQL Database is automatically maintained at an “evergreen” (always patched) state. Point-in-time restore is supported by default for up to 7 days, and automatic, geo-redundant backups are provided. The AWS Relational Database Service (RDS) is different in that it automatically applies patches within a 30-minute timeframe and may be set up to use a multi-availability zone (AZ) deployment to lessen the negative effects of any restarts that may be necessary. By default, it allows you to restore your data to any period during the past seven days.
Every Step of the Process is Supported by the Cloud
Supporting processes are crucial to a smooth transition to the cloud. Affirma takes a cycled approach to cloud adoption, adapting recommendations to each client’s specific situation and the state of their cloud initiatives. We help customers in four key areas of their Azure and AWS cloud migration:
1. Baseline network, storage, computing, directory services, security, identity and access management (IAM), and cost management strategies are all part of the cloud’s “foundational services,” which are adopted and deployed initially. Additionally, if necessary, a hybrid cloud model can be set up, allowing for the connectivity of on-premises with AWS or Azure systems.
2. Optimization of cloud expenses, reporting, monitoring, bolstering cloud security, and catering to unique requirements all contribute to what we call “cloud maturity,” or the growth and improvement of existing cloud setups.
3. The term “cloud refactoring” refers to the process of making changes to preexisting Azure and AWS installations in order to lessen the human labour involved in traditional server maintenance tasks like patch management and backup. A hand in making the switch from Infrastructure as a Service to Platform as a Service.
4. Planning and deploying highly specialised environments, such as PCI, NIST, HIPAA, and other compliance-heavy regions in Azure and AWS.
Basics of Moving to the Cloud
Cloud migration relies heavily on technology, but it’s also important to think about the people and procedures that will help with the transition and keep the environment running smoothly afterwards. There are three key aspects that, in our opinion, must be present for cloud migration to be successful.
People: It is essential to keep in mind the people who will be utilising and maintaining your cloud infrastructure. Successful adoption of the cloud depends on the abilities and organisation of the team implementing it. Gaining momentum for a cloud initiative requires finding “cloud champions” and implementing an effective communication strategy.
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Process: We take into account things like ongoing migration initiatives, security, governance, organisational norms, and more as we plan your transition to the cloud. While some businesses thrive with an agile methodology, others may be more at home with an IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)-centric strategy. Maintaining, developing, and supporting cloud infrastructure can be optimised for your business if your company’s operations are tailored to your culture.
Technological: The use of modern technological means is essential. Important parts of the technology stack include backup and recovery, network design, configuration and deployment standards, identity and access control, cost management, and site-to-site connection. Investing time and effort into planning your cloud adoption’s future phases, including figuring out your long-term roadmap and setting up your environment to support your mid- and long-term goals, will pay benefits.
Although there are many things to think about before making the move to the cloud, doing so wisely will pay off in the long run by allowing your technology to expand and adapt as your business develops. With a little forethought, moving to the cloud can help you automate mundane jobs, streamline time-consuming procurement procedures, speed up the return on investment from IT initiatives, and possibly even lower your overall IT budget.
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