From enabling businesses to facilitate basic email access to allowing them to manage complex application suites, cloud computing provides a versatile and scalable solution for a wide range of organizational needs. However, amidst the cloud’s undeniable benefits, a critical question arises: Which workloads deserve priority consideration for migration? Answering this question necessitates a meticulous evaluation of the diverse advantages the cloud can offer to distinct workloads, alongside a rigorous assessment of their suitability.
How does a workload benefit from cloud migration?
Not every workload is suited for the cloud. In some cases, cloud migration optimizes a workload, improving its performance or making it more cost-effective. Alternatively, migration could have the opposite effect.
Identifying which benefits relate to a workload is vital to ensuring your migration to the cloud best serves the needs of your organization.
Performance
The cloud provides access to a robust infrastructure and cutting-edge technologies, which can significantly enhance the responsiveness and convenience of workloads critical to your business operations. This is especially vital for workloads that may have capabilities that exceed existing on-premises hardware.
Cost savings
Migrating workloads to the cloud could result in substantial savings on infrastructure investments, which become the cloud provider’s responsibility. Furthermore, cloud providers handle upgrades and updates as part of their service, allowing organizations to benefit from advancements without additional costs. This can be especially beneficial to workloads that are simultaneously highly critical to your business and expensive to implement.
Security
Security is paramount when moving workloads to the cloud. Safeguarding business operations and preventing data breaches and ransomware require robust technologies and processes. For organizations lacking IT security expertise or managing high-risk data, such as those regulated by the government, a cloud solution becomes an attractive option.
Accessibility
One of the cloud’s defining characteristics is its accessibility from any location with internet access, at any time, and through any device. Depending on whether you have a traditional or hybrid work setup, or have mobile team members, making critical workloads more accessible could be a priority.
Modernization and scalability
Cloud migration is often driven by the need to modernize applications and capitalize on scalability. While a “lift and shift” approach transfers applications with minimal code modifications, true modernization involves redesigning workloads for increased performance and scalability. Some workloads may not need or be suitable for modernization, meaning they do not need to be migrated or to be replaced with a more flexible application.
Cloud migration assessment
In addition to identifying how your workloads could benefit from cloud migration, you should also assess your existing applications to determine whether they should be migrated. Ensure your assessment process incorporates the following criteria:
Strategic value
Evaluate the strategic importance of each application in terms of how critical they are to the functioning of your organization. Once you’ve identified the workloads of high strategic importance, you can prioritize them for cloud migration.
Application customization
Heavily customized apps or software specific to a business can present compatibility challenges when transitioning to cloud-based solutions. Evaluate the extent of these customizations and their compatibility with a particular cloud service or environment.
Regulatory requirements
Consider legal requirements such as the General Data Protection Regulation, as well as specific data regulations for financial and healthcare organizations, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. Such requirements can determine whether or not you are allowed to migrate a workload to the cloud.
Performance requirements
Does an application require fast response times and minimal latency? If so, then you need to determine whether the same application can perform as needed on the cloud.
Stakeholders
Identify critical stakeholders for each application, as they may need to be included and consulted on the decision-making processes.
Productivity costs and output
Measure and quantify the resources a workload consumes compared to its output, then determine how those rates will be affected by cloud migration.
Traffic volume
Quantify the amount of traffic a workload handles. Depending on the volume of traffic, an application may or may not be suited for full cloud migration.
Prepare your systems and workloads for migration to the cloud by speaking with a Liberty Center One expert today.