Most organizations stumble quickly in the middle when it comes to building the right cloud foundations. Organizations are unable to define and execute the right cloud architecture while building solutions. Billions of dollars and efforts are invested on cloud engineers and third-party services. Our strong research identified ten ways where the cloud foundational elements turn simple and effective thus eliminating the need for dependencies.
Short-term gains always become painful and this is so common for organizations when they move their operations to the cloud, especially IT departments migrate a set of applications to the cloud with a desire to gain from the cloud. But such an approach also has subsequent and significant consequences that are immeasurable.
Many companies including banks are hiring cloud engineers to accelerate their cloud foundations. The investments are rising but the ability of the right foundational architecture is filling the gap.
The solid cloud foundations are not about investment or delaying ROI, it’s all about understanding the critical steps and executing them in a flow. Our research and experience prove that companies that have a strong cloud foundation have accelerated 360-degree growth and there has been a 50% reduction in costs over the long term.
Ten critical steps to building a powerful cloud foundations
Creating a cloud foundation is less about cost and more about achieving speed, value, agility, and most importantly, deployments. As digital transformation is at the frontier, it’s crucial for companies to implement these steps as part of cloud development.
1. Technology optimization for automating the production journey
Workloads are hugely dependent on either the cloud or traditional data centers and to get the work done, organizations are still operating with old-school working techniques where delays or frustrations keep happening. Your cloud foundation must maintain safety and security to make the production environment smooth and efficient.
In real-time, automating the steps in the production journey that includes sandbox requests, firewall changes, on-demand creation of isolated networks, identity and access management (IAM), and much more. Automating these steps adds value to the cloud data centers.
However, the cloud simplifies automation and helps organizations to restructure their migration process by changing the way IT teams operate.
2. Building a scalable cloud architecture
The companies have the complete potential to build a cloud architecture with a team of five and can scale it up to more than 500 teams without making any changes. As the number of teams grows, a well-design architecture must be able to accommodate more application patterns, virtual networks, and capabilities.
To scale any cloud architecture, the basic aspect is to have well-designed interfaces between these components. Scaling a cloud architecture never goes right on the first attempt but when it scales, the companies can outperform their competitors.
3. Building a centralized cloud platform in an organization
Most IT organizations don’t fit the shape of designing the cloud architecture. It depends upon how well the teams are organized to give shape to the design and technology. A few companies operate by assigning a cloud team for each operation. Indeed, this seems to be messy as one architecture system could not be reused by other teams. This effects the entire organization thus increasing operational costs. It even creates redundancies and slowdowns.
IT must design a cloud architecture where all cloud functionalities are distributed and used effectively thereby lowering costs and optimizing the usage and performance of applications.
4. Use the existing cloud across the organization
Eliminate your fear of being locked in while using the cloud. There are many ways that you can mitigate the risk and one of the ways is to examine the potential to develop cloud infrastructure and make it a core for the teams. The shared cloud platform simplifies the collaboration process and product development across teams.
Every cloud service provider has a lock-in time frame. When you define a time limit, implement the practices that enable rapid shift, and improve resiliency capabilities, lock-ins can be easily manipulated.
5. Build cloud products instead of cloud services
It’s common for companies to utilize cloud services in IT and business operations. The services indeed must have a center to grant access to approved cloud services. Here the business will go through many complexities such as defects and poor transparency as there will be no coherent architecture to use.
Develop the products using the cloud and offer them to scale your operations. All it needs is a shared cloud service platform with a centralized architecture. The market cap for cloud products is always on the rise and as an organization, it becomes simple to establish its own cloud.
Building products for the smooth running of applications, creating the right application patterns to integrate, and running its own virtual network using the existing capabilities are the potential functions of a cloud foundation.
6. Application patterns to maximize ROI
It’s natural for organizations to migrate applications to the cloud and because of inconsistent support from the cloud service providers, the maintenance inventory turns complex.
As a paradigm shift, organizations must consider deployment capabilities as a standalone product using application patterns. The usage of application patterns includes configuring shared resources, deployment pipeline standardization, and quality and security compliance.
The design of application patterns can be small and this can maximize ROI. The success of designing application patterns using the cloud and achieving ROI is predicted to be 95%.
7. Aiming for efficient deployments using virtual networks
Soon after the deployments, the applications continue to function in virtual cloud environments. Speeding up cloud migration would start with a single virtual network to host all applications. Hosting all applications on a single network zone would make it riskier and affect other configurations.
One virtual network for each application for efficient deployment of applications leads to a strong cloud foundation. And it varies from one company to another depending on the size of the business. While migrating to the cloud, a few aspects such as resiliency, software and hardware support, level of security, and change in virtual cloud network when needed become crucial components.
8. Create reusable base capabilities for the cloud
Many organizations use multiple clouds to manage workload dependencies. And these organizations rebuild the same capabilities for multiple clouds such as network connectivity, routing, identity management, logging, access control, etc. But this consumes time and effort by multiple teams, Rather, it’s advisable to build these base capabilities at once and reuse them whenever needed across the virtual environments. These capabilities can be reused even though the applications reside in adjacent virtual zones.
9. Integration-base foundation to speed up acquisitions
Merging IT assets is always challenging and time-consuming for organizations. The only way to speed up merging processes and simplify the process is to create an integration-base foundation. It runs the assets and allows all the other functionality to work as designed. All the existing workloads are easily transferred to the main base at a predictable pace.
10. Use security-as-code to automate cloud security
Security-as-Code (SaC) is a widely used and the most effective way of securing cloud applications or cloud products with agility and speed. It’s a need for IT industry to operate using a security layer. To maximize the cloud’s potential and meet the upcoming complex scenarios, new security architecture adoption is a must. The SaC approach meets the cybersecurity policies and standards in programmable ways and automatically embeds into configuration scripts for cloud systems.
Every IT operations follow the rule of starting small and growing big. The fundamentals are preliminary actionable steps to build an effective asset. This principle applies to cloud foundations as well. Scalable and reusable cloud platforms to support all the IT workloads captures the full potential of the cloud thereby scaling the organizations too.
We are here to deploy applications or migrate cloud with the right strategy to maximize your business potential. Scaling teams and supporting huge environments, we are successful in extending the capabilities of IT infrastructure that depends entirely on the cloud.
