Cloud Migration Complete: What's Next for your Business?

Migrating key business applications to the cloud is a significant step towards digital transformation, and opens up a world of possibilities for your organisation. But the journey doesn't end here. Whether you’re looking to optimise your environment, make the jump to being fully cloud-native, or use cloud as a springboard to harness the latest innovations like AI, it’s important to plan your next steps, and take actions that ensure you harness the full value of the cloud. 

Optimising your Environment 

Having settled into your new cloud environment, the next logical step is to ensure you’re best placed to get the maximum value. Most providers will offer a range of cloud optimisation tools, intended to drive both improved performance and an enhanced security posture. Making effective use of these early on helps ensure you get the full value of cloud as soon as possible after migration. 

Start by utilising cloud native monitoring tools to gain insights into your application performance and resource usage. These tools provide valuable data on how your applications are performing and where bottlenecks might be occurring, helping you fine-tune resource allocation and identify apps that may need some degree of refactoring in order to truly excel in the cloud. 

Once you have an idea of your baseline resource consumption, implementing auto-scaling reduces your management burden by automatically adjusting resources based on demand. This ensures you’re able to flex to meet periods of increased demand, while still scaling down during quieter times so that you're not overpaying for unused capacity. It's a key feature of the cloud that can significantly improve your cost efficiency, without affecting experience for your end users, and is one of the biggest opportunities for cloud optimisation. 

Alternatively, if your workload has consistent resource requirements throughout the year, most cloud providers will offer a discount for committing to hosting that workload for a given length of time – usually 1 or 3 years. This is an easy way to ensure cost effectiveness for these applications, with discounts in some cases reaching as high as 70%. 

Cost isn’t the only concern in the cloud. The security of your environment is a shared responsibility between you and your cloud provider. Providers fulfil their end of the bargain by offering robust cloud-native security tools, but it's up to you to implement them effectively. As a starter, implement identity and access management policies to control who has access to your resources, lowering the risk of cyber criminals accessing your cloud with compromised credentials. It’s also critical to regularly audit your cloud environment for potential vulnerabilities – don’t be afraid to utilise third-party cloud security solutions if you’re not sure a provider’s built-in tools can keep your workloads secure. 

Becoming Cloud Native 

While optimising your existing applications in the cloud can yield significant benefits, truly harnessing the power of the cloud often requires a shift to cloud native practices. This means rethinking how your applications are built and operated to fully leverage the cloud's capabilities. 

Cloud native applications are designed specifically for cloud environments. They're typically built using microservices architectures, which breaks applications down into smaller, independently deployable services. This approach offers numerous benefits, including improved scalability, flexibility, and faster deployment. 

You may even be able to refactor your application using an existing Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering, a purpose-built cloud service built to support your application with all of the underlying infrastructure resource you need. 

Rearchitecting applications isn’t the only way to become cloud-native, though. SaaS applications are built in the cloud for a specific purpose, and they can often be used to replace legacy on-premises applications to help move further into the cloud (and reduce or eliminate the need for you to maintain an on-prem infrastructure). If a particular application is struggling in the cloud, or proving to be a bottleneck for important business processes, it may be easier to licence a SaaS alternative, rather than refactoring the problem application to work in the cloud. 

While becoming cloud native is often a significant undertaking, it offers undeniable benefits in terms of agility, efficiency, and scalability. Plus, in the longer term, it often delivers much greater cost efficiency for businesses, eliminating the need for on-premises infrastructure while supercharging the productivity of cloud-based applications. 

Jumping into the Future 

Once you've optimised your environment and embraced cloud-native practices, you're well-positioned to leverage some of the most exciting and innovative capabilities that cloud has to offer, particularly in the realms of data analytics and artificial intelligence. 

Cloud-based data analytics tools allow you to aggregate and analyse data from various sources at scale. By taking advantage of the virtually unlimited storage and processing power cloud offers, you can process and analyse large datasets quickly and cost-effectively, providing insights that drive better decision-making across your business. Cloud migration also helps to eliminate data siloes, and can open up new frameworks for data storage, such as data lakes or data warehouses, which can power your analytics even further. 

AI and Machine Learning (ML) have established themselves as the next frontier of business IT, and cloud offers an easy way for all businesses to capitalise on them. While traditional AI solutions are only accessible to large enterprises with significant resources, Cloud AI removes the barriers to entry. Utilising public cloud services allows businesses of all sizes to harness these innovations while leveraging scalable, consumption-based infrastructure and pre-built AI tools. 

The use cases for cloud AI are endless, but it’s particularly well-suited for those looking to test the waters with initial Proof of Concept (PoC) deployments, or those in data-heavy industries such as eCommerce and finance who can leverage scalable infrastructure to analyse vast datasets. The cloud provides the infrastructure and tools needed to implement AI solutions without the need for hardware investments, and, as AI continues to evolve, having a strong cloud foundation will allow you to remain on the cutting edge. 

Starting your Cloud Journey

A successful cloud migration is just the beginning of your digital transformation, opening the doors for future IT innovation. By optimising your environment, embracing cloud-native practices, and exploring cutting-edge technologies like advanced analytics and AI, cloud helps deliver on the full benefits of digital transformation.  

If you need some guidance to help you take the next step in your cloud journey, we’re here to help. Our Cloud Optimisation Assessment identifies opportunities for improvement, and helps to build your cloud environment into a solid foundation for future projects. Book your assessment today, and unlock the full potential of your cloud investment.