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Unlocking cloud potential: The Fusion5 approach to seamless migration
This article originally appeared on ITNews, republished here with permission.
There are many reasons to migrate to the cloud, but how an organisation chooses to get there can have major consequences for what it finds at its destination.
According to Kris Jackson, general manager for cloud infrastructure and security at Fusion5, benefits such as reduced costs, improved security, and stronger governance are all achievable, but also depend on how the migration is planned and executed.
Jackson says there are three considerations that are critical when planning a successful cloud migration.
"To start with, make sure that you really understand your workloads in your environment," he says. "The second thing is to make sure that you realise that every single minute of a service that's running in the cloud is charged.
"And the third thing is to ask whether your business is really ready to support workloads in the cloud. Do they have the right knowledge around cloud constructs and what what's required from a governance perspective and control?"
Jackson says failure to consider these three questions can create scenarios such as cost overruns and inappropriate workloads being moved to the cloud, both of which can lead to spending blowouts, especially when poorly trained teams are unable to wrangle them back control.
For these reasons Jackson says it is important to choose a partner that can both properly assess and manage the migration process, and also train up internal resources to ensure that staff can properly manage the new environment.
This creates the opportunity to move beyond managing the cloud using traditional processes, and to manage the new environment using machine-readable definition files, in an approach referred to as infrastructure-as-code.
Jackson says this approach can lead to additional cost efficiencies through management automation, as well as improved security.
"So it's important to understand how your team's going to operate within the new environment and what tools they're going to use to be able to leverage that automation."
