By: Ashutosh Dixit, Senior Director, Consulting

The saying “When in Rome, avoid the wild west mentality” cautions against recklessness. Life was simpler before computers. Basic needs such as food, money transfer, social connect, shopping, books, and entertainment, were happening fairly well before the age of the great digitalization. Then came the phase when the ease of doing things became the new marquee. Computers became necessary for enhanced experiences. Those necessities evolved into digital forms like online banking, mobile shopping, social media, food delivery apps and integrated business systems.

The Open University (UK) asserts that computing technology permeates almost every aspect of the daily lives of people. The use of computers has allowed departments like Electricity, Municipality, Governments, Colleges, Hospitals, and Hotels to elevate their customer experience. The computer systems they used, however, were hosted on their private premises, otherwise known as ‘On-premises’ or ‘Data Center’. They are now considering use of rented virtual spaces, called ‘Cloud”, to further elevate their operations.

Enterprises are now embracing cloud to take advantage of state-of-the-art technologies and to benefit from traditional on-premises workloads. However, there is a risk that Cloud implementation can become just another rented data center. Many mid-size to enterprise companies have already started using cloud over the past five years, with the buzzword ‘Journey to Cloud’ evolving into ‘Journey through Cloud.’ They are now looking for ways to enhance their overall experience in this new data center.

• Avoid Capacity Guessing and Pre-Provisioning: in a typical data center, resources like servers, storage, and network devices are procured well in advance of the need. However, having idle resources does not fit well with IT economics. To avoid this, application owners would estimate upcoming unpredictable loads, which often led to underestimating or overestimating the required capacity. This resulted in additional costs or a disappointing customer experience. With Cloud, there are virtually unlimited resources available to use on demand. This eliminates the need to pre-provision, reduces guesswork, and offers resources with elasticity, that expand and shrink based on demand. Cloud providers like AWS have Auto Scaling EC2, Dynamo DB, RedShift Serverless, Lambda, and other services that customers can adopt to provide an optimal customer experience while keeping the costs pocket friendly.
• Go Cloud Native with Managed Services (Everything as a Service): A complex workload cannot be run on just a few VMs. When enterprises move to the Cloud, the entire ecosystem moves with it, making it necessary to adopt managed services to ease operations overheads and reduce monitoring, logging, security, infrastructure, and license costs. Managed services come with a one-click DR and HA setup and virtually limitless elasticity. It’s important to take advantage of native monitoring systems, security tools, and queuing services when running applications in the cloud. Once an architecture is thoughtfully constructed, a cloud-native setup is easier to maintain, upgrade, and troubleshoot. While multi-cloud expansion can be a challenge, vendor-agnostic managed services can be used with integration programs and a bit of re-engineering. Modern Cloud providers are moving towards providing an ‘Everything as a Service’ based model, which allows enterprises to opt for any piece of their choice to fit into their Infrastructure. This reduces the ’Time-to-Market’ for any product and creates a seamless ecosystem for resources.
• Expense and Inventory Awareness: in data centers, application owners often don’t consider physical data centers, facilities, and common administration costs, leading to underestimation of project costs. This creates complications in deriving the apportionable costs of running projects. In Cloud, enforcing strategic tagging models and chargeback systems can get any project’s end-to-end cost. This leads to improved cost accuracy and enables real-time cost visibility, allowing decision-makers to set insight-led roadmaps and priorities. This also promotes a culture of cost accountability and an understanding of the business value of the cloud and the competitive advantages available.In Cloud, each resource is a separately identifiable object. Correct tagging allows us to track changes in resources both attribute and reference-wise. In contrast, in data centers, maintaining an accurate inventory is tricky. IT owners can lose track of resources once created. This is different in the Cloud, where every vendor has a portfolio of management apps that report on the whole enterprise inventory, often through a single pane of governance. This opens possibilities for tracking minor changes in resources with ease.
• Use Automation Everywhere and Anywhere: self -healing and automation are fundamental benefits of being in the Cloud. Leveraging intelligent monitoring services with serverless auto-remediation modules can reduce a significant portion of operational overheads. This bonus capacity allows organizations to focus on their core business instead of running behind servers to maintain and troubleshoot them manually. In-built tools like AWS Systems Manager, Config, and Google Cloud Asset Inventory can implement effective automation without much hassle. Endless possibilities of serverless-based automation and AI-ML-trained models can reduce resource usage drastically.
• Understand New Service Level Agreement: once you have made your journey to Cloud, Vendors provide new service level agreement for different services and features in Cloud. This SLA may be bundled with other vendor products. Enterprises should learn how support for third-party products has been provided in the past. Cloud Technical Account Managers can help with this.
• Cost vs Efficiency Trade-Off: every Cloud has different performance categories of the same product. While in any typical data center, most companies are obliged to use whatever available disk drives, server capacities, and load balancers exist, in Cloud, there are specialized products for each of these needs. The use of object storage can significantly reduce the cost of static files, documents, logs, and media-type objects. Customers should understand the right price vs. performance tier of individual products for different Prod / Dev / Stage / Test environments. Architects can choose the best solutions among available options for each use case, considering that not all products and projects require the same level of security, high availability, monitoring, performance, and alertness. This helps to achieve the right balance between cost and efficiency.
• Serverless: journey to Cloud would never been this meaningful without concept of Serverless. Serverless is an approach of running applications without worrying about underlying servers. The customer doesn’t need to provision or maintain VM to run the workload. They only pay for the execution time of the program running under a serverless service. Serverless is great for ad-hoc, unpredictable, and non-24X7 running workloads. A program stitched with serverless services such as Cloud Function (Azure) or AWS Lambda can generate reports and only charge for executed queries.
• Handling Non-Production Workloads: non Non-production workloads rarely require running full-day computing or capacity at full. In traditional data centers, limited flexibility and automation make it difficult to start and stop workloads on a need basis. In the Cloud, developers and testers can start and stop services and resume their sessions as needed. This reduces the compute hours of non-critical, non-24X7, or internal facing workloads and helps reduce overall costs.
• Security at Cloud: a common phrase ‘Security is shared responsibility’ can be confusing. It can be interpreted differently by different customers. To simplify this, it’s best to take care of the security of every resource created inside the AWS account along with its data. Since one doesn’t have to worry about any physical devices, security practices are comparatively easy in the Cloud than in traditional infrastructure. Cloud vendors have security modules in the form of services at pay-as-you-go basis. Enterprises should understand different offerings that can ease their security responsibilities. Key management systems, secret managers, network and applications firewalls, infrastructure defense systems, and vulnerability scanners are a few examples of services available at all major clouds and can be implemented within a few hours.

While it’s true that one can never aim for a perfect ecosystem, and the scope of improvement is what keeps enterprises running, the above-given practices can give a head start in the world of the Modernized Cloud. Implementation of all of them may not be an overnight task, but a neatly created backlog of priorities will set Cloud utilization on the right path of improvement. The upcoming boom of services and features of low code, no code, AI-ML-driven products can further change the trajectory of this adoption. But for now, companies utilizing best practices will always have a superior edge over others.

Cloud computing has become a game-changer for businesses, enabling them to cut costs, improve flexibility, and enhance scalability. However, adopting cloud technology can be a complex and challenging process, especially for companies without prior experience. A immature move in early stages can create irreversible technical debt for organizations.

The LTIMindtree Consulting team can help companies adopt cloud computing by providing expertise not only on cloud-based data center infrastructure, migration strategies, security, and compliance but also help them implementing cloud to maximize potential. We can also help identify the best services and tools to meet the organization’s specific needs. Additionally, consultants can provide training to help employees adapt to the new technology and learn how to extract the best possible value for your organization. As your strategic and implementation partner our company can plan for a smooth and successful transition to the cloud-based data center, leading to improved efficiency, productivity, and competitiveness in the long run.