The move to the cloud is in full swing as businesses seek to migrate their on-premise services to public clouds like Microsoft Azure. While some organisations still resist this shift, they often base their decisions on misconceptions that are no longer valid, so let’s debunk some of these myths.
Myth #1: Migrating enterprise workloads is risky and expensive
While this might have been true in the past, a properly planned and Cloud Adoption Framework aligned migration can make Enterprise workload migrations seamless and secure. To be successful quickly, organisations need to properly review their cloud estate for compute, network, and storage infrastructure requirements, plan to potentially leverage native cloud services (PaaS), efficiently deploy, and test cloud systems, ensure data replication, and, of course, be setup to save money. This is where a team of Azure Migration specialists come in handy. They can help you make the process stress-free by understanding your business goals and planning accordingly.
Myth #2: Moving to the Cloud threatens user control
This is simply not the case. Deploying Cloud solutions does not remove control from the organisation. Instead, it makes it easier for you to maximise your investment. By using service offerings, your IT staff can focus more on the technology’s desired functions and capabilities rather than its upkeep and maintenance. Technology partners that offer these services can provide support and apply significant experience when designing for operational resilience, security and compliance, and geo-diversity when helping you implement and manage Cloud solutions.
Myth #3: Cloud costs start out cheap but get expensive extremely quickly
Organisations are realising that the Cloud can be a very expensive proposition depending on your use cases, performance, retention, replication settings, and service levels. With a technology partner with expertise in Cloud optimisation, you can ensure you don’t invest in unnecessary Cloud infrastructure for your environment and are engaged with the right team to proactively control your Cloud costs, as your Cloud journey matures.
Myth #4: On-premises servers are more secure than the Cloud
The idea that on-premises data centers are more secure than Cloud security is fundamentally flawed. Cloud security can be just as, if not more secure than on-prem. However, this requires following the best practices made for the Cloud. Migrating to a Cloud service like Microsoft Azure takes advantage of Microsoft’s yearly USD$1 Billion investment in Cloud security, not to mention Microsoft Sentinel leveraging AI. When completing a Cloud Migration, you can ensure that your environment hosted in Azure takes advantage of all the security services that are relevant to your use case.
Myth #5: Application rationalisation must be completed upfront prior to Cloud Migration
Many organisations have legacy applications that are critical to their business operations, and it is not feasible to rearchitect or decommission them all at once. Migrating these applications to the Cloud can be challenging, but it is not impossible. There are several approaches to modernising legacy applications, including staging to Brennan Private Cloud for cost saving benefit, then assessing for lift-and-shift. Approaches beyond the basic lift and shift, workloads can be assessed for resize or refactor, where the application is moved to the Cloud without making any significant changes to it, refactor, where the application is modified to take advantage of Cloud-native features, or rebuild – where the application is rebuilt from scratch using Cloud-native technologies. By taking a measured approach and working with experienced Cloud migration specialists, organisations can successfully modernise their environment and reap the benefits of the Cloud.