Cloud adoption has become the new norm in the post-COVID business environment, and rightfully so. A 2020 study by Accenture states that migrating areas of your business to the public cloud can cut your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by as much as 40 percent. However, the path to becoming a digital-first enterprise has many challenges, particularly for small and medium enterprises, in terms of migrating to a cloud computing environment quickly and efficiently, which is often easier said than done.

Migrating to the cloud requires meticulous planning, a thorough understanding of the tools available, and a long-term vision in order to successfully implement a cloud computing infrastructure that suits your individual business needs. In this blog, we’ll help you implement an impactful public cloud computing infrastructure with 5 best practices.

Thorough assessment of cloud computing options

Your journey towards cloud adoption and migration must begin with thoroughly understanding the cloud service options available and how conducive they are to your business needs and budget. With a rise in demand for cloud computing, the number of cloud service providers has also increased drastically. However, selecting the right cloud partner for your business requires a dedicated effort.

Having a clear vision of what you want to achieve from a public cloud service helps significantly in trimming down the available options. Remember, no two cloud services are made equal. It’s important to conduct a detailed analysis including a cloud service profile, past experience in cloud deployment, the types of industries it has served, and pricing structure to find out if their services match your requirement.

It is also important to note that a partnership with a cloud service provider is a long-term deal. Shifting from one cloud vendor to another brings business operations to a halt entirely and adds further cost to the company. Therefore, you do it once and do it right.

Design your cloud migration strategy

Depending on your current business scenario and existing technology infrastructure, it’s important to communicate with your selected cloud partner to design a practical and efficient cloud migration strategy.

Two of the most common approaches to cloud migration strategy are:

Forklift Approach: This strategy is appropriate for companies with huge data sets. Here, the on-premise data sets are migrated to an equivalent digital storage platform using a public cloud server.

Data Migration as a Service: Many cloud service providers provide specialized data migration as a service option, where they transition on-premise data to the cloud architecture slowly using a step-by-step approach.

Make sure that the approach you select is detailed enough to understand all the intricacies of data migration with respect to your organization and are flexible enough to locate every data set mapped against its on-premise counterpart.

As your data storage needs increase, your cloud service should be scalable enough to accommodate your storage needs. Having the right security measures also helps in ensuring that mission-critical on-premise information is secured from any potential data leak during the migration process.

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Select cloud computing technology that matches your company policies

Speaking of data security, your ideal cloud computing technology should be compatible with the company’s security, data management, and compliance policy. The trickiest part is that most client-to-client cloud security infrastructure shows little to no difference in its functionality. You must study the reference cloud architecture that cloud services offer in order to understand how their governance and work patterns differ from each other. 

With this exercise, you can align your business needs to the cloud roadmap and select the perfect partner for cloud deployment.

We strongly advise opting for portable cloud master data management with a cloud architecture that supports micro-services to enable continuous updates and enhancement of a cloud system, which is crucial in the modern business environment. It should also provide on-demand scalability in terms of data volume, sources, and the number of end-users with secured encryption.

And to seal the deal, your cloud service provider must provide you with continuous compliance software that continuously monitors and regulates the cloud’s integrity with dedicated checks on governance and compliance issues.

Incorporate automation to accelerate business operations

Incorporating a plethora of cloud computing applications to connect multiple business software and automating business operations is the next step in maximizing your company’s digital efficiency. Cloud infrastructure helps you in designing business process automation (BPA) infrastructure to automate everyday business tasks by synergizing various enterprise tools.

As every application connected with the cloud can be operated and implemented through code, you can deploy repeatable automation templates to carry out the process accurately without human intervention.

And the possibilities don’t stop here!

You can also implement Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Internet of Things (IoT) features to your digital ecosystem to further accelerate business operations with added accuracy, so that you can focus on important business tasks. Cloud computing can also conduct data analytics by processing data stored in servers to create a cost-effective and impactful data analytics system.

Create an inventory of existing IT tools

Last but certainly not the least, creating an existing IT tools inventory will help you select the right cloud computing ecosystem among a variety of service providers. Analyzing your current IT tools and applications gives you a better picture of the applications and processes that need to be migrated to a cloud system.

The inter-dependency of on-premise and cloud applications plays a crucial role in designing an ideal cloud infrastructure. The seamless communication and data transfer between on-premise and cloud applications, with minimum network latency, can help you design a hybrid cloud system by incorporating a combination of public cloud and on-premise servers.

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Successfully implementing a cloud computing infrastructure for your business can give you a competitive edge and keep your business future-proof in a business environment increasingly dominated by all things digital. We hope that the points mentioned above will help you design the most robust and bespoke cloud system that caters to your business objectives.

ZeaCloud® will be more than happy to be a part of your business’ growth by providing cost-effective public cloud services that provide visible results.

Reach out to us today to know more about how we can help you in augmenting growth and revenues with the cloud.

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