The benefits of using a Cloud platform have proven in recent years. These are in the scalability, the speed at which new services and applications can be put into production. Your new business models can now be realized quickly. Many organizations feel the pressure to migrate existing on-premises systems to the cloud environment.
However, there are many considerations involved in migration. What are the requirements for security, availability and performance? What does this mean for service management for internal and external customers? If you have a pre-scan performed, benefits to be gained quickly become clear. In order to be able to accurately assess costs, benefits and risks, a business case can be drawn up. This includes your choices for the cloud platform, your desired service model and the appropriate service provider.
Which Cloud?
The vast majority of companies use multiple cloud service providers. The public cloud means an external storage of your data that does not guarantee security and privacy. In the current second phase of cloud migrations, many companies are considering moving to a private or hybrid cloud environment.
This is responded to with the offer of “Content Collaboration Platforms”, see Gartner. For many organizations, such an integrated solution with limited self-management is attractive. As an example, see the open source Nextcloud.
The internal organization
The migration to the Cloud, outsourcing the management of infrastructure and application services, has consequences for your internal IT organization. It will focus less on operational management, but all the more so with vendor(s) management and policies around the use of cloud services.
When choosing a Platform as a Service (PaaS) for the development of your own applications or micro-services, this has consequences. Should a professional team be incorporated into the cloud platform?
The new cloud platforms are based on several existing and recently mature technologies:
- Virtualization with data integration/data segregation
- Identity & Access Management
- Security as a service
- Native cloud app’s, the container microservices (Docker and Kubernetes)
- REST APIs, orchestration and management
- DevOps continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD)