Moving your critical infrastructure to the cloud isn’t as hard as you think

Cloud adoption rates have continued to rise through 2018. Having been the driving force behind digital transformation for small and medium sized businesses, it is predicted that this year will see a tipping point for enterprise cloud adoption.

According to Forrester, this year will see over 50% of enterprise workloads moved to the cloud. This prediction is supported by the findings of a LogicMonitor survey published earlier this year, in which respondents foresee 83% of workloads will be in the cloud by 2020. The survey suggests 41% will be running on public cloud platforms, with 20% using private cloud and a further 22% adopting a hybrid approach.

The naysayers that predicted cloud would have limited appeal to medium-large enterprises have had to admit that the cloud “bubble” is not going to burst. Adoption rates have continued to grow year-on-year as organisations of all sizes seek to take advantage of the reliability, flexibility and cost-effectiveness that cloud brings.

While these benefits are widely accepted, some organisations still feel a degree of reticence around making the jump to a cloud first strategy. This may be because of a perceived gap between what ‘good’ looks like (i.e. the ability to move their desired apps to the cloud) and the realities of budget, skills and resource constraints. For some, this makes a cloud-first strategy something that organisations pay lip service to, rather than committing to digital transformation.

There are two other reasons that organisations often cite when asked about their hesitance to move: Firstly, the belief that their critical applications are not cloud ready, and secondly a desire to maximise ROI on legacy technology – adopting the cloud for new tech only.

One or more of these reasons may ring true for your organisation, but we’d like to point out that you can have the best of all worlds – maximise the returns on your legacy investment, migrate your business-critical apps to the cloud and realise the cost, scale and availability benefits of cloud infrastructure.

‘Traditional’ vs. ‘cloud built’ applications

The business applications market has been experiencing its own revolution in recent years. Larger organisations are effectively re-writing traditional apps in a native cloud environment; creating cloud-scale, container-based applications, rather than an on-premises solution based within a single OS.

Cloud-scale, container-based apps (like Netflix or Salesforce) can run in hyper-scaler environments on public cloud infrastructure. The sheer volume of containers used (thousands) means these applications can be rapidly scaled up and down. It also means they are incredibly resilient, even if running on low-level SLA hardware, as they can tolerate a lot of the underlying hardware going offline without affecting performance.

In comparison, most small-medium sized organisations don’t have access to the budget or development resource required to transition their legacy apps in to cloud-scale apps. As a result, they are more likely to rely upon traditional software applications.

However, this does not mean your apps aren’t cloud ready. For traditional business-critical applications that require 100% uptime, private cloud infrastructure or colocation of your hardware in a third-party data centre can deliver the same benefits of scalability and availability.

A hybrid approach

With applications at different stages in their lifecycle, your cloud adoption strategy is likely to feature a phased migration. Between their current and desired state, organisations will migrate some systems early to take advantage of improvements in availability, security and scalability.

But there’s no need to stop there. Legacy applications are seen to hold companies back, but this shouldn’t be the case. Moving these apps now to a Private Cloud (eliminating the need to re-build them) provides a true cloud first strategy through this blended, hybrid approach.

Many of your applications can be moved sooner than you think and Thrive’s team is ready to advise you on just this. Speak to us to find out more about them.