Cloud Strategy

What Is Cloud Strategy?

A cloud strategy is not the same as an implementation plan, which ultimately instructs teams on the actual migration. Instead, a cloud strategy explains what the cloud is and why the implementation is a critical step to scaling your organization’s infrastructure capabilities.

The best strategy for the cloud is the one that’s created specifically for your organization. These strategies are not one-size-fits-all, and they need to be frequently revisited, as your organization’s needs and goals evolve.

Types of Cloud Architecture

With the multitude of hybrid, public, and private cloud solutions available, organizations have an opportunity to place the workload in the best digital infrastructure.

Public. Public cloud solutions, like AWS, Azure, and GCP, are available to anyone via the public internet. With the right planning and design these vetted, secure, affordable, easily scalable, and reliable public cloud options can accelerate innovation and deliver business transformation.
Private. Private cloud solutions feature infrastructure and networks dedicated to a single organization, providing more control over the environment. High-compliance industries, such as healthcare or finance, often utilize private cloud technology.
Hybrid. A hybrid cloud solution combines cloud services with colocation or on-premise solutions.
Single and Multi-cloud. These cloud solutions are exactly what they sound like: a single cloud architecture utilizes only one cloud, while a multi-cloud strategy uses more than one public or private cloud solution.

Benefits of Moving to the Cloud

There are a number of benefits of moving to the cloud that are seen across industries. Some of these benefits include:

A competitive advantage. Be more competitive through more agile and distributed development. Leave us to manage the data center business — and focus on what you know best: your core business processes.
Efficient disaster recovery. With back-up built into your cloud solution, your organization immediately has a more efficient disaster recovery.
Financial savings. By taking advantage of efficient cloud-native architectures, and automated deployment of workloads your organization costs can be reduced through decreased labor costs and less in-house data management.
OPEX model and included updates. Rather than a CAPEX model, this OPEX model allows you to save time and money. In addition, you can have access to the latest hardware without having to cycle it out yourself.
Scalability, elasticity, and future growth. While IT used to have to house all the infrastructure to handle peak demand, those spikes can be handled with ease in the cloud, allowing for near-infinite scaling and elasticity.

Before migrating to the cloud it’s important to understand your business goals and goals for utilizing the power of the cloud.

Industries Benefiting From Moving to the Cloud

Organizations across the globe are benefiting from an effective cloud strategy, including:

Financial Services

Often, banks and other financial institutions are at the forefront of technological changes — and cloud computing advancements are no exception.

While there have been valid concerns in the past, the cloud can now be delivered with 99.999% uptime SLAs to guarantee a highly available, geographically diverse architecture for financial organizations.

This can transform the IT department from a cost center to a profit center. IT teams are freed up to create and release new products in order to disrupt the market and give customers what they want — even before they know they needed it.

Cloud computing is crucial to financial services, as it allows organizations to connect with their end-users in a quick, efficient, and secure manner.

Healthcare

The healthcare industry is constantly evolving, growing, and producing more data. In order to securely store, access, and utilize this data, it’s important that healthcare entities create a cloud strategy that’s flexible, cost-effective, and secure.

For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic hospitals were receiving an influx of data from tests, vaccinations, and more. Having a cloud computing system that is able to scale along with this influx of data, as well as scale back whenever the need arises was essential to public health and the economics of healthcare today.

In addition to patient information, it’s also important that healthcare organizations have the ability to research, collaborate, innovate, and produce new products and solutions. The public cloud has empowered scientists to efficiently find cures by tapping into transformational compute power and public genomic datasets.

Education

As more technology makes its way into education and more learning environments are remote, cloud computing is becoming increasingly popular in the education sector.

This move benefits students, teachers, school administrators, and parents. By moving to cloud computing, educators can connect and collaborate with their students no matter where they are located, providing them with a more consistent learning experience. In addition, cloud resources provide a reliable experience for teachers, which provides them with the tools they need to successfully carry out their work.

There are also long-term cost savings to be considered, including that all compliance, future upgrades, and routine maintenance functions are automatically executed through the cloud service provider.

Automotive

Cloud computing influences many aspects of the automotive industry, from manufacturing to operating smart car capabilities.

Through cloud computing, manufacturers can meet demand, improve their processes, and create a more efficient distribution experience. In addition, smart vehicles are able to connect more efficiently, provide improved reliability, and create an increasingly better experience for end-users.

By utilizing cloud computing, the automotive industry can help meet the increasing demands of their customers, provide efficient and secure products, and make cost-effective business decisions.

Nonprofit and Public Sector Organizations

While some might think that cloud computing is just for enterprise organizations, businesses of every size can benefit from this migration, including nonprofit and public sector organizations.

Cloud-based collaboration tools help global organizations empower volunteers around the world. The cloud allows organizations to reach more people and provide more support for their respective causes by connecting employees and donors.

The cloud can be a secure, central repository for reports required for grants, other funding, and financial information by providing a secure storage environment for essential documents, including volunteer information.

Through cloud computing, nonprofit and public sector organizations can become more efficient, reach a wider audience, and securely store all their necessary information to help make the world a better place.

Why Does Your Organization Need a Cloud Strategy?

Your organization’s cloud strategy provides a roadmap for future cloud implementations and enhancements, as your business and application needs evolve.

A cloud strategy will also help define the roles and responsible parties to help ensure cloud adoption is enabled across your organization, while also creating a process to evaluate future opportunities within the cloud. This process helps build confidence in your strategy and makes sure it is always aligned with your organization’s strategic business objectives.

Lastly, a successful cloud strategy will establish targets and key performance indicators to better assess the overall success of your IT investments over time.

The Connection Between a Cloud Strategy and MGI

When developing a cloud strategy, consideration of infrastructure choice pros and cons is key. There is not a one size fits all approach to a cloud, but fortunately, there are resources and consultants that can guide you on the journey.

Evoque’s Multi-Generational Infrastructure™ (MGI) enables enterprises not to be constrained by colocation agreements. Instead, it empowers enterprises to take advantage of the best of cloud and colocation. With MGI, organizations can deploy workloads where they function best, and with SpendAgility™, colocation costs can be shifted to cloud engineering and cloud connectivity.

With this flexible application-first, infrastructure agnostic approach application teams have newfound freedom and are no longer obliged to infrastructure limitations.

How Do You Develop a Cloud Strategy?

In order to create a cloud strategy that works for your organization, it’s important to understand what needs to go into the plan based on your business objectives.

Overall business assessment. First, you’ll want to assess the needs of your organization. Some questions to ask include:
- What business objectives do we want to reach in the long- and short-term?
- What benefits do we get from our current data strategy
- What benefits do we hope to achieve from an updated cloud strategy?
Examine cloud security and compliance requirements. Before you get started, you’ll need to consider your security requirements. For some industries — such as healthcare — patient data must be stored in a space that fulfills all compliance requirements. Be sure to know what your requirements are and choose a provider that can meet them both now and as they evolve in the future.
Include your stakeholders. In order to get your entire organization on board and invested in your cloud strategy, it’s important to have everyone involved across departments and teams, including your leadership.
Develop your cloud strategy. Once you know what goals you’re looking to achieve, know what requirements you need to meet, and have your entire organization involved, it’s time to actually create and execute your cloud strategy.

Today’s Cloud Challenges

Risk-aversion.With your data stored in a third-party cloud provider, you may not have as much control over it as you would like. This can create a feeling of concern around data breaches, physical damage, and similar issues.
Changing applications. Your applications can benefit from increased agility by taking an application-first approach to infrastructure choice. As the marketplace and applications change over time, it’s important to have a flexible data strategy that allows you to update your infrastructure strategy.
Lack of internal resources. It can be difficult for some organizations to manage their cloud computing resources by themselves, as they may have a small team or lack knowledge on the topic.

Cloud strategy consultants are available to help you mitigate risks, plan for internal resources, and more.

What Does a Cloud Consultant Do?

Cloud consultants are experts in cloud infrastructure, cloud architecture, and the cloud strategy that is needed for a successful migration. They assist organizations in choosing and implementing the right cloud technologies that serve their business needs and goals.

With 70% of IT decision-makers citing a skills gap within their team in regards to cloud migration, security, and optimization, it’s crucial to supplement that knowledge. The consultant teams can bridge the knowledge gap allowing organizations to innovate and scale their cloud infrastructure more effectively.

How Can Evoque Help?

Evoque’s cloud engineering team, Foghorn, is an AWS Premier Partner, Azure Gold Partner, GCP Partner, and HashiCorp Partner. Our seasoned full-stack engineers have been delivering digital transformations for enterprises on the cloud since the cloud was new.

Some of the benefits you can expect from working with our cloud engineering team include:

3-5 dedicated CloudOps engineers.
Experts who work alongside your team.
Slack-based chat and ticket system.
100+ cloud competencies and certifications.
Cloud enablement and innovation velocity.
FogSource code library access.

Contact us today to learn more about how Evoque Cloud Engineering can improve your organization’s cloud strategy and help you harness the transformative power of the cloud!

NEXT STEP: TALK TO AN EVOQUE INFRASTRUCTURE EXPERT

Building secure data centers, alongside fault tolerant, self healing, cloud enabled, and automated workloads is our specialty. We’re uptime obsessed and committed to delivering the best colocation and cloud solution for our customers from one generation of their application to the next.

Reach out to learn about Evoque’s best-in-breed colocation, hybrid, and cloud professional services

AN INTRODUCTION TO CLOUD STRATEGY

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