The modern cloud is arguably the most significant technological advancement of the last decade. The cloud has enabled organisations big and small to reduce costs, modernise their propositions and create innovative new products and services. We recently helped a leading travel brand to enter two new markets and increase their website performance by 50% in their first migration project.

So it’s understandable that we’re seeing a whole range of organisations scrabbling to experience the benefits of the cloud. When you first start your journey, it’s natural to want to move fast 
and see results quickly. But common problems can often present a significant barrier to taking that first step into the cloud. 

We’ve compiled a list of 3 of the most common problems your organisation might face and how to prevent them from standing in the way of your cloud migration. 

Cloud Infrastructure

A common question we’re asked by clients is: “What does the ideal cloud architecture look like? And how do we facilitate effective migration if our architecture doesn’t live up to this ideal?” 

To quote Zig Zigler, you are where you are. The first step is to accurately define your architecture. By mapping out your total IT architecture, including interrelationships between key systems and principles for building, modifying and interfacing resources such as software, you’ll be able to standardise and begin the process of organising and aligning your infrastructure to support your business goals.  

The key is to tackle standardisation as soon as possible. By having high quality, repeatable infrastructure deployments in place, you can achieve cost savings in a number of areas. Once you’ve got deployment standards established, new projects require less work. By encoding practices into your deployments, you’re reducing mistakes and the opportunity for human error as well as security risks. 

To read more about this, you can download our EA’s Guide to Reliable Infrastructure Deployments in the Cloud here.  

Security & Identity

One of the most common misconceptions about the cloud is that you have to sacrifice security in order to migrate. But high-level security concerns, like unauthorised data exposure, weak access control and identity affect both traditional IT and cloud systems. So for the majority of concerns, cloud security is IT security. 

Information security within any enterprise is largely concerned with access. Weak identity and credentials management pose a legitimate security threat to your systems and data but cloud platform providers such as Microsoft Azure have a range of services to help manage this. 

Azure Active Directory is a universal identity service that provides single sign-on (SSO) and multi-factor authentication to help protect your users. SSO provides simplified access to your applications from anywhere, whilst conditional access controls and multi-factor authentication helps you to protect and completely govern access with adaptive policies - meaning you can grant, limit or block access with certain criteria. 

BP has recently deployed this solution to detect unusual patterns of behaviour and enforce user access, granting it only to devices and locations that they know are right, improving security and reducing their info-sec risk. 

Cost

You see it in all the cloud solution providers headlines “Save costs with the cloud”.  Whilst Cap-Ex / Op-Ex conversation has been well established and the challenge of organisational cost management has been made easier, there are a number of secret costs that need to be anticipated and managed post-migration.  

In our experience, three prime suspects can drive your costs in the cloud: usage, data egress and data storage. (Watch out for an upcoming blog on that!) Microsoft Azure gives you a suite of services to help you manage these and other costs through pro-active monitoring, in-built governance controls and a library of best practices. 

The cost analysis module allows you to forecast your costs on a monthly basis and optimise your spend based on historical data. You can use tools such as accumulated granularity to map your spend against budget(s) and categorisation that helps you identify costs by service or resource helping you keep on top of your usage.

By managing these costs effectively, you’re ensuring that migrating to the cloud can have both immediate and long term commercial value for your business. 

Summary

Starting out on your journey to the cloud can be daunting, but by identifying these common barriers within your organisation and understanding how you’ll overcome them, you’re giving your cloud migration project the best possible chance of success. 

Once you’ve migrated, you can start to realise the benefits that the cloud has to offer from storage and networking to Platform as a Service (PaaS) and other microservices that can help you modernise legacy systems and build cloud-native applications that drive your organisation forward.

Starting out on your cloud journey? Why not speak to one of our Azure migration experts at hello@dootrix.com and book a free cloud discovery today.