Thinking smart: The role of business intelligence in a cloud-first strategy

Is moving critical IT infrastructure to the cloud something of an inevitability? Digital transformation needs to be carried out at the right time; meeting business needs whilst maximising return on legacy on-premises infrastructure. This places an onus on organisations to develop a ‘cloud-first’ strategy.

According to LogicMonitor’s Cloud Vision 2020 study, 83% of workloads will run from the cloud by 2020. Compare this to today’s 68% and you begin to realise that the growing appetite for cloud models shows no signs of slowing.

By blending off- and on-premises infrastructure, organisations are benefiting from the availability, flexibility and cost-efficiency that this environment provides; indeed 72% of cloud users employ this hybrid strategy. However, you can’t just ‘lift and shift’ your infrastructure because of the service disruption this would cause, let alone budget impact.

To combat this, cloud-ready organisations need to adopt a staged approach. The question is, how do you identify and prioritise the order in which you migrate your technology? The answer lies in business intelligence (BI).

THE POWER OF BI

Business intelligence utilises the Big Data that’s gathered from your network and turns this information into actionable intelligence, which organisations can use to improve decision making and mitigate risk.

Using network device reporting and data analytics tools allows you to gather credible business intelligence that you can use to build your technology roadmap and inform your journey to a hybrid environment. By collecting, collating and interpreting key information on the devices that make up your network, you can plan your phased migration according to criticality and lifecycle.

THE RESULTS

Deploying BI tools gives you a snapshot of the health of your network and lifecycle of your equipment. Tools such as Double Red will also generate reports that grade your devices according to business importance; highlight areas of concern and recommend remedial actions. This allows you to prioritise your phased move in terms of:

• Elements that are ‘at risk’ (those that are vulnerable, end-of-life or out of support)
• Devices that are nearing the end of their lifecycle
• Equipment graded as ‘safe’

You can then use this information as part of your wider digital transformation strategy and timeline; determining which applications can be migrated to public or private cloud, moved to colocation, upgraded on-premises or sweated in their current state.