Cloud computing is no longer a buzzword. It has become an industry with a global market value of $371 billion, and it is still growing exponentially. As per this report, by 2026, the global cloud computing market is expected to reach $947.3 billion in value. When it comes to its strategy, it is a brief point of view on the role of the cloud within the organization. Simply put, it is a living document that is mainly designed to bridge between high-level corporate strategy and a cloud implementation/adoption/migration plan.
Importance of a Cloud Strategy for a Business
Designing an effective cloud strategy is essential for businesses since it allows them to scale, maintain flexibility, and focus on their efforts on business operations. It also optimizes business outcomes, including speed, resilience, and agility. Furthermore, it also enables organizations to grow public cloud skills internally and facilitates creative recruiting strategies to bridge the talent gap.
One of the best ways to enhance cloud adoption with a robust cloud strategy is to work with a cloud partner. Secondly, IT organizations or businesses should consider the following steps when building, implementing, and maturing cloud computing strategies.
Let’s check them out:
Steps to Consider While Implementing Cloud Strategies in Your Business.
A powerful cloud strategy helps businesses to anticipate the benefits and risks associated with the cloud. It also enables you to create a plan that best aligns with your business goals and develop the actionable steps for rapid execution.
1. Choose the Right Cloud Deployment Model
The first step should include building a cloud strategy to determine how you want to deploy the cloud within your organization. Then, it becomes easier to choose the right deployment model for you.
So, let’s look at different cloud deployment models to select as per your business:
Public Cloud: This deployment model is the opposite of the public deployment model. It is a one-on-one environment for a single user or customer. The public cloud provides better flexibility and control over cloud resources. Here are some of the advantages of the private cloud model are:
- Minimal investment
- No setup cost
- Dynamic scalability
- Zero maintenance
Private Cloud: This deployment model is completely opposite of the public deployment model. It is a dedicated and on-demand infrastructure and resources that are owned by the user organization.
When it comes to deployment, it is operated by the business, which is solely responsible for infrastructure, apps, and security of the private cloud. Users can access the private cloud resources over a private network or VPN. On the other hand, external users can access the organization’s IT resources through a web interface over the public network. Advantages of private cloud include:
- Better control
- Data security & privacy
- Customization
- Supports legacy systems
Hybrid Cloud: With a hybrid solution, you can host the app in a safe environment while taking advantage of the public cloud’s cost savings. Moreover, businesses can move data and apps between different clouds using a combination of two or more cloud deployment methods, depending on their needs.
Community Cloud: This cloud deployment model allows systems and services to be accessible by a group of organizations. As a distributed system, community cloud, created by integrating the services of different clouds to address the specific needs of a community or business.
To summarize , you can choose from these cloud deployment models as per your business’ requirements. However, through a hybrid cloud deployment model, customers can connect existing on-premises resources with infrastructure and applications on the cloud.
2. Prioritize a Primary Provider in Multicloud Architectures
Most businesses are almost fully operationalized with at least one central public cloud such as IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) or PaaS (Platform as a Service) provider. Implementing multi-cloud strategies improves flexibility; however, they can also increase complexity and cost. Nevertheless, businesses can manage multi-cloud costs and complexity by defining a strategy for cloud workload placement.
An ideal solution is to opt for a primary, preferred provider. When the organization has business requirements that a provider can’t meet, add additional providers in an orderly fashion driven by business’ specific needs.
3. Create Resilience in Application Architecture
Resilience is a business differentiator. If your rivals suffer through downtimes and delays while your business carries on, then your IT services have created an opportunity to showcase the superiority of your product and services. According to the Gartner report, “30% of enterprises will establish new roles focused on IT resilience and boost end-to-end reliability, tolerability, and recoverability by at least 45%, by the end of 2025.”
4. Build Hybrid Cloud Architecture
The hybrid cloud is sometimes referred to as Hybrid IT. It is a sophisticated computer system which combines the advantages of public cloud, private cloud, and other IT platforms. It is a really good goal for the company’s digital transformation strategy, and all you need to do is ensure that it is built correctly.
When it comes to the advantages of hybrid cloud, it is a combination of public and private cloud, which provides both security and reliability for the most important systems.
Adopting hybrid cloud architecture can help businesses save a lot of money over traditional data center management and software development costs. For example, with hybrid cloud architecture, organizations can save up to 40%-50% of their annual IT spend on in-house or on-premise data centers by simply adopting hybrid cloud solutions.
5. Optimize for Cloud-native with Containers & Serverless
Initially, public cloud IaaS was delivered exclusively through virtual machines. The new virtualization methods are on-trend, including containers and serverless computing. The apps designed with cloud-native architecture require a higher degree of service discovery, automation, robust network communications, and security. Both containers and serverless computing allow resource consumption to be better customized to the actual apps’ requirements. It improves infrastructure agility, automation efficiency, and cost optimization.
6. Address the Potential Risks of the Cloud
Data is considered the most critical resource in the business. However, both security and compliance regulations govern how it is supposed to be stored and who has access to the data. Thus, it is essential to understand the terms of your cloud provider clearly. In most cases, it’s highly recommended to store your data in the cloud. Moreover, it’s also important to ensure your ownership of the data to check the terms and conditions of your contract. Your cloud service provider should also not be able to access, use or share your data. In addition, you need to have a secure way to recover the data on-demand.
Conclusion
Wrapping up, we can say that to create an effective cloud strategy you need to keep the following things in mind:
- Identify your objectives for moving to the cloud.
- Cost management. It must be an integral part of your cloud strategy.
Whether you are a healthcare provider or any other business holder, you need to adopt cloud computing with a robust cloud strategy. Using this strategy for your business aims to minimize IT obstacles associated with growing IT infrastructure. In addition, with the adoption of a powerful cloud computing platform and strategy, your business will become more agile. As a result, you can add, remove, or expand IT infrastructure resources with ease.
