Second step in cloud migration – strategy

This is the third in a multi-part series. Follow the series here.

Strategy might seem the first logical step in a cloud deployment, but it goes hand-in-hand with the preparation step – and often needs to be revisited after companies have determined how they want to leverage the cloud.

Strategy is as broad as a company wants to make it.  It also presents a more nuanced view of cloud – hybrid strategies.  Unless a company is a ground-up brand-new start-up, they are already running their infrastructure somewhere.  Hybrid is merely describing a combination of infrastructures:  what currently exists, and what will exist in the cloud.

For some period of time – and possibly forever – these two infrastructures need to be connected, and the company’s users need to access both.  If the gains made in flexibility and ease of management by moving workloads to the cloud are lost because legacy infrastructure needs to be managed separately, the strategy needs to be revisited.

The definition of IaaS might seem to define an infrastructure that is complete, just “drop in your data and go” but it’s rarely that simple.  The same way companies had to buttress their on-premises servers with security, fail-over capabilities, load balancing, access control and management, etc., cloud infrastructures require the same.  Most hybrid deployments exist between an IaaS system and an on-premises deployment. Very often, in the case of multi-tier applications, the front-end will be deployed on the IaaS, while the actual databases and data will be on-premises.

All public cloud infrastructures offer varying choices for security, fail-over, load balancing, etc.  In fact, they offer many choices.  There are natively-built solutions, and third party products.  Strategy comes down to determining what features are needed and which solutions fit.  Most of the native solutions are basic – good for some, not for others.  Many companies built very robust security around their on-premises solutions; often, included cloud platform tools are too basic.  Often, companies need cloud security that closely mirrors that of their on-premises deployments – which is why companies turn to specialized third party vendors.

The good news is that there is a wealth of choices, which is also the bad news.  Companies will need to qualify the security solutions they are going to add into their cloud infrastructure to determine that they do, indeed, meet their requirements.

We’ll look at qualification in our next blog.

If you would like more information on how Barracuda can help you migrate to the public cloud, visit us on the web here:

Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Microsoft Azure