How do I use the full potential of the cloud?

Three main challenges to your cloud strategy 

Transitioning to the cloud is not without its challenges, and there are many things that can become a barrier to success. The following are the top three challenges we most often see to achieving great cloud strategy results: 

1. You start without a clear strategy 

The transitioning of your company to the cloud lacks clear, well-thought-out strategy: without carefully considering key objectives and drivers, and a detailed business case and roadmap, you will not know where you are going and if or not your approach will pay off. Ask yourself why you moved to the cloud (or why you want to move to the cloud). Look at it from both a business and a technical point of view. 

2. You have difficulty setting priorities 

If you adopt a piecemeal approach and migrate your workload to the cloud in stages, without keeping the bigger picture in mind, you could quickly come up against limitations as your different projects start getting in the way of each other. This is why it is important to take a holistic view of your cloud strategy and to set priorities. To achieve this, you will need good insight into what are the most important factors and priorities for your business. 

3. You are not sure if you are ready for the cloud 

Moving to the cloud will have a major impact on any business. If your business processes are not ready for the flexibility and scalability that the cloud offers, you will not be able to take full advantage of those benefits. Your IT department will need to be prepared, too, as working with the cloud is a major change from in-house IT operations. If your IT staff are not equipped with the right skills, this will hold back your cloud strategy. 

Any of these challenges could make you feel as though your move to the cloud may not be the success that you had first hoped for. 

Determine the right direction with these handy tools  

Are you unfamiliar with working in the cloud? If so, Cegeka has a few tools that will help you to determine whether your organisation, applications and infrastructure are ready for the cloud. These handy tools can help you to find the right direction for your cloud strategy. 

Cloud Adoption Assessment 

When we carry out a Cloud Adoption Assessment, we evaluate if your company is ready to switch to the cloud. The aim is to identify any gaps between your business and its current IT provision – and gaps between your strategy and any organisational changes that may be necessary – so that you can work towards eliminating these gaps. In undertaking a Cloud Adoption Assessment, we look at the bigger picture, including your processes and your people. Our approach also covers change management. 

6R Scan 

We look at the landscape of your current applications and evaluate how well they fit into the cloud. For each application we use our 6R Scan method to determine the best option: 

• Retire 
  Eliminate the application if it is no longer needed. 
• Retain 
  Keep the application as it is. 
• Repurchase 
  Replace the application with a new one that takes into account your requirements. 
• Rehost 
  Migrate the application to another cloud environment without changing the code. 
• Refactor 
  Optimise the application code to improve its performance; for example, with cloud-native development and microservices. 
• Replatform 
  Move the application to a new platform; for example, with containment in the public cloud or Cegeka Cloud. 
  

When we determine these outcomes, we observe not only the technical aspects of your landscape but also your security and compliance (e.g. compliance with GDPR). 

Cloud Migration Assessment 

With our Cloud Migration Assessment we take a closer look at your infrastructure. What kind of architecture are you using? What network requirements do you have? Which operating systems are you running? Which frameworks do your applications use? You will already have all these different workloads within your own data centre, and we evaluate whether or not this architecture is compatible with the cloud and the best route to take in migrating to the cloud. We also determine the cost of migration and operational costs once your workloads are running in the cloud. 

Get more value from your cloud efforts 

Have you already migrated to the cloud – but it has not brought the benefits you had hoped for? Are costs higher than expected? Even if this is the case, all is not lost. 

Cloud services already offer all kinds of tools to keep your costs under control. Think of reserved instances, policies, autoscaling and tagging, to name a few. Read more about cost optimisation in the cloud here.

Our approach 

Do you need help in determining your path to the cloud? Our approach will help you to do this in the following three phases: 

1. Strategy workshop 

Our strategy workshop provides us with a clear understanding of your business strategy, your motivation for moving to the cloud and a picture of your current IT environment. 

2. Analysis

We analyse your situation and expectations so that we can determine the challenges and opportunities that you face in your cloud journey. 

3. Concrete migration plan 

We then present you with a concrete migration plan to turn theory into practice. We are vendor-independent, which means that we can offer you the best solutions to meet your needs. If necessary, we can also run your workloads in our own European data centres. 

We always take a pragmatic approach, adapted to your organisation.