December 2, 2022
Digital transformation is poised to disrupt every industry and every business. As enterprises look to leverage exponential technologies and modernise their IT infrastructure, cloud is emerging as the de facto platform for powering agility, innovation and growth. However, lifting existing workloads to the cloud does not unlock its potential.
To truly capitalise on cloud and stay ahead of the curve, businesses require holistic transformation encompassing people, processes and technology. This is where Cloud Transformation Platforms play a pivotal role.
A Cloud Transformation Platform provides the tools, frameworks and expertise needed to strategise, optimise and streamline your move to the cloud. From assessing your application portfolio to re-architecting monoliths, from migrating data centres to building cloud-native services, it guides every aspect of your journey with a structured and automated approach.
This article discusses nine key facets of cloud transformation and how a platform can help accelerate and simplify each step.
Developing an effective cloud strategy is the first step.
A cloud transformation platform helps craft a tailored approach by analysing your current infrastructure, workloads and business objectives. It comprehensively assesses your landscape, including cataloguing applications and dependencies, mapping infrastructure resources, studying usage patterns, evaluating support contracts, identifying security gaps, and more.
Migrating legacy systems and applications to the cloud can be daunting due to technical debt, regulatory requirements and change management hurdles.
With platform like Amaze, you get migration advisors, automated assessments and customised migration plans tailored to your unique needs. Amaze identifies optimisation opportunities, integration requirements and compliance controls upfront so you can confidently migrate at your desired pace without disrupting operations.
Intelligent migration wizards automatically analyse your workloads and dependencies to build optimised deployment blueprints. Robotic process automation (RPA) then handles the bottom-heavy operational heavy lifting to deploy your applications according to those plans.
You can focus on strategic initiatives while Amaze ensures seamless, low-risk migrations with integrated security, identity and access management. Its catalogue of remediation templates capture best practices to resolve common migration issues at scale.
Rationalising your extensive application portfolio is critical. A cloud transformation platform provides visualisation and analytical tools to evaluate each application based on over 20 attributes like dependencies, maintenance effort, technical debt, data usage, customer channel usage, code quality, support types, etc.
Based on these attributes, applications are categorised into optimising, migrating, or modernising buckets through stakeholder workshops.
Complex monoliths are broken into services. Legacy apps are tagged for retirement. The output is a prioritised migration blueprint at an application-group level to guide your cloud adoption efforts.
A cloud transformation platform analyses your on-premise vs cloud cost structures and prescribes the most cost-efficient migration approach. Comprehensive cost models are built by factoring aspects like infrastructure and platform services, maintenance, support, and hardware refreshes for your data centres.
Similar models forecast cloud costs based on usage projections, purchase/rental pricing, reserved/on-demand instances, and continuous optimisation strategies.
The total Cost of Ownership is compared across scenarios to find the optimum cloud deployment size and pacing. Cost data is centralised for ongoing chargeback. Savings opportunities through server rationalisation, licence optimisation, and automated management are identified.
A cloud transformation platform establishes a comprehensive security program encompassing people, processes, and controls. It begins with conducting security assessments to understand existing and target environmental risks. Gap analyses are performed against compliance standards.
New security architectures are designed considering authentication, authorisation, encryption, access control, monitoring, and defences for vulnerabilities. Tools are integrated for audits, patching management, incident response, and threat detection. A centralised security configuration is implemented.
Operational processes like review and approval workflows are streamlined. Training programs help associates embrace a security-centred culture and protocols.
The cloud transformation platform implements fault-tolerant designs through architectural blueprints incorporating features like auto-scaling, self-healing, load-balancing, redundancy, and disaster recovery. Monitoring tools capture infrastructure and application metrics. Dashboards provide real-time visibility and awareness of performance, usage, and anomalies.
Automated responses are developed to address issues proactively. Capacity planning ensures scaling keeps pace with unpredictable traffic spikes. Documentation and runbooks standardise incident management.
Cloud penetration testing validates preparedness for outages and attacks. The outcomes provide continuous delivery of services with minimal downtimes.
Automation is a cornerstone of transformation. A platform develops configuration management databases (CMDBs) to establish a single source of truth. Infrastructure-as-code templates define all resource provisioning through code for repeatability.
Continuous integration pipelines incorporate standard checks and approvals for releases. Configuration changes are tracked. Deployments are versioned. APIs and automation tools enhance app and data movement between on-premise and cloud environments.
Testing suites validate quality. Self-service catalogues empower developers. Integration with monitoring and ticketing systems provides closed-loop visibility. The efforts establish optimised DevOps practices for agility.
