Cloud Modernization: Why Lift and Shift Can Lead to Drift

This article originally appeared in CIO Dive.

Several years ago, companies rushed to move their data to the cloud simply for the sake of being in the cloud. But adopting a cloud strategy should not be taken lightly. It’s a journey that requires a methodical approach, deep domain knowledge, top-notch security and a trusted partner. Along that road, you’ll find greater scalability, resiliency, agility and innovation.

While many organizations have begun their cloud journeys, most are nowhere near complete. No matter where you happen to be in your cloud journey, it is important that you set priorities and identify optimal outcomes before advancing any further. By taking the time to develop—or refine—a comprehensive cloud strategy that addresses your specific business needs, you will ensure that you are receiving the greatest possible value from your cloud investment.

Most organizations are either just starting out on their cloud journey or are already well on their way. It’s no longer really an option for organizations to embrace cloud, as CEOs and boardroom executives have said that digital transformation is one of their top three priorities. At the same time, adopting cloud entails change, and change sometimes causes resistance, along with risk and fear of the unknown. Change is also a disruptor, and in the context of cloud, it’s the biggest business disruptor.

Alliance Residential Company, one of the largest multifamily housing real estate developers in the United States, needed to rebuild many of its internal corporate support departments, including the IT department, after its sale of its management division.

Maintaining an optimized, healthy, and modern IT infrastructure is crucial for the survival of any business. ConvergeOne Managed Services, powered by OnGuard, allows IT staff to rest easy knowing that a highly-skilled team of engineers leveraging an industry-leading management platform are watching over their customer’s environment. OnGuard has been developed by ConvergeOne from real-world engineering insights and decades of experience managing client infrastructures.

With public cloud adoption becoming the way of life for the increasing number of organizations looking to solve business challenges with remote working, questions about its security implications are inevitable. However, security has many different meanings and challenges in the public cloud with native solutions.

Over the years, we have seen a shift from the concept of traditional IT, where a relational database was used for everything, to the public cloud. As the rate of generation and the demand for data continues to grow at an exponential rate, many businesses now face the challenge of not knowing how to cope with the rapid changes while having so much data at their disposal. Users that once dealt with Gigabytes (GBs) of data find themselves now having to learn how to work with Petabytes (PBs). This goes to show that in order for businesses to continue to excel, they need to remain proactive and evolve along with the ever-changing world of technology.

Since its launch in 2010, Microsoft Azure has gained popularity and trust with customers on a global scale. Azure is a public cloud offering that provides solutions for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). However, as with any cloud provider, there are concerns around security and breach issues (i.e., how safe is my data?), as the solutions are hosted in a cloud service provider (CSP) data center.

The AWS Well-Architected Framework is used by Cloud Architects to plan, migrate, transform, and operate their workloads on AWS. Migrating your applications and servers from Data Centers into the AWS Cloud requires a specific approach and is different for all clients. But thanks to the AWS Well-Architected Framework, here at ConvergeOne we have the necessary tools and knowledge to access your applications/servers’ environments and design solutions that use the Five Pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. These five pillars should not only be used for cloud migrations. They are crucial points of consideration when designing in the cloud, applications, and even physical Data Centers. Below is a break down of the five pillars and some of the key important points to consider when migrating to the AWS Cloud: