The Fastest Path to The Cloud Starts with Knowledge: Start Small, Scale Fast

There’s a massive drive for organizations to move to the cloud. In fact, statistics show that 83 percent of enterprise workloads will move to the cloud by 2020, and we continue to see adoption rise. But why?

Interest generation comes from the many benefits that cloud deployment offers, including agility, scalability, elasticity, pay for what you use, and—most debatable—cost savings.

On-premises infrastructure has many constraints around it. For example, organizations want to move away from a CapEx model and to an OpEx model, which gives them the flexibility to invest in research and development projects that will have a business impact on their organization’s evolution.

Since the birth of cloud, many organizations have embraced it without fully understanding the model. The hype, which made it so successful, was cost savings: most believed that moving infrastructures to the cloud would save them money. While in some scenarios it can, many organizations got burnt—mainly because they didn’t fully understand cloud architecture or usage patterns, and never planned for a potential exit strategy.

Planning is Key

Moving to the cloud requires adequate planning—and knowledge. Start by evaluating your existing infrastructure and understanding your applications. What are their dependencies and criticality to the business?

Organizations often make the mistake of assuming they can architect the cloud like any other on-premise infrastructure, when in fact cloud design and architecture is slightly different from on-premises implementations. For this reason, you need to train existing employees to improve their knowledge base on cloud, and even develop employee subject matter experts.

Which Cloud Option is Best?

Knowing your options and selecting the appropriate deployment model for your organization is also key. This is one of the building blocks to exploring the cloud. With the misconception that cloud solutions are “cheap”, organizations can easily get drawn in—then quickly get to realize it has many moving parts.

Not all applications are suitable for the cloud. For example, some legacy and latency sensitive applications may not function adequately in the cloud. Be sure to perform an assessment of all applications, identifying those that will be suitable for migration. The assessment should cover key components such as security, networking, and data gravity.

A good place to start is by selecting an application that has little dependency and is not critical to the business. Build your platform around this application to understand the cloud services and delivery model best suited for your requirements. Then run a proof of concept for the acceptability of the applications workload in the cloud. This approach defines the initial baseline and evolution into the cloud for your organization and application cloud readiness. It also provides insight into your application resource and service requirements for the cloud.

With a clear understanding from your initial deployment, you can start to explore the services and benefits of the cloud. For example, elasticity: do you need to have your application running 24/7 in the cloud? Can you have a process that powers up your applications when required, then scale to the required workload? Will your applications return to their previous state when tasks are completed?

The flexibilities provided by the cloud can give organizations the opportunity to grow exponentially, while mitigating some risks. To learn more about Teradata’s cloud deployment options, I encourage you to follow the conversation at #CloudExperts or #BuiltForTheCloud, or reach out to your Teradata account executive.