Why Cloud?

[Former Member]

Why go to Cloud

Before you ask that question, envision your future state of IT. To understand that try to find out future state of Business value. In future Business will deliver value to customers using artificial Intelligence to perform clever human like work by computers and predicting future states using machine learning. At first these terms sound sci-fi, but reality is it’s happening right now. Driver less cars, Drive Assist car features, Smart thermostat learning are common examples.
Simply put the future state of IT is to support future state of how Business deliver value to customer. In order to achieve that today's IT need to be prepared by moving to right platform where it can be 100% agile, scalable, massive computing power, virtually unlimited storage, scale with demand from business workload, ingest streaming data, 100% infrastructure virtualization.
As the old saying Innovation becomes obligation, today Sci-Fi thought becomes tomorrow's mainstream usage and to survive in business world you should meet your customer expectations. So, it's inevitable that your competitor will lead your market space by adopting the forward-thinking culture.

 

How go to Cloud

Now the question is how to migrate to future state of IT platform safely without impacting today's IT state?

The following is a simple 3 phase process.
First Phase - Assess
Second Phase - Migrate
Third Phase - Optimize/Support

Assess Phase -- In this phase use automated tools to discover and document all the IT infrastructure components, Applications. Map Application to Infrastructure dependencies and assess each Application migration path.

Second Phase -- Here you prepare a migration plan, and use migration tools which help you accelerate your cloud migration.

Third Phase -- This is not end of Cloud journey but it’s the first stepping stone of your Cloud adoption. Starting from here you can regularly Monitor, Track, and Analyze your service usage leading to cost exploration and cost savings.

 

What to do on Cloud

Assuming you have adopted Cloud (IaaS), your IT operational process needs to be adaptive to reap the benefits of Cloud's agility. Like metered utility services Power, Water, Gas., try to adapt to mindset of paying exactly for how much is consumed. Shutdown the systems during night hours, weekend hours. Let project capex pay for the additional compute requirement. Provision compute that meets your average consumption and spin-up compute for peak occasions. Move the backup data to Cloud tape for low cost storage.
Regularly Monitor, Track and Analyze your service usage leading to cost exploration and cost savings. So, it's something like every week or month you find out Business Application IT foot print and start shaping your IT resources exactly to fit your business expectations. Not more nor less that’s perfection.
From a business innovation perspective, you can try the following initiatives to leverage Cloud features -
Redesign/Implement your IoT scenario globally using Cloud's IoT streaming services
Pipe the IoT data and other customer buying patterns to Cloud's machine learning service to predict future state of customer and deliver value tailored to customer pattern.
Develop your own C2B (Customer to Business) workflows by integrating different customer events to backend Business applications using AWS Lambda services and deliver value through AI methods.
Faster time to market because of zero delay in infrastructure procurement for deployment projects.