Managed Cloud Migration – Where fast IT means even faster time to value

As a leader in the industry we get approached with a really wide variety of RFP requests for cloud migrations and management. Yet there’s a real trend appearing in cloud computing migration strategy. While a simple lift and shift of existing infrastructure and the current operating model remain at the core, many of these businesses are now putting a premium on building  speed, agility and new capabilities into customers' IT environment. I believe that IT leaders in many ‘traditional’ - (e.g. not pure software/technology) companies -  have now realised how their more agile peers are leveraging cloud for operational speed and application modernization. Understandably they want to see the same benefits for their businesses too.

So what does this mean in practice? 

IT speed is fundamentally delivered by delegated decision authority, automation of operations, effective controls and the ability to leverage PaaS offerings from the public cloud vendor.

So when application teams are able to test, select and implement the right technologies and solutions without excessive coordination with the infrastructure, network and architecture teams can then easily adapt technology to an agile, empowered way. This means they can be fully responsible for their deliveries.  When Nordcloud migrates customers to the public cloud we make sure automated guardrails are in place so that delegation and low coordination still keep costs in check and the environment secure. For example, In practical terms our fully automated landing zone solutions for AWS, Azure and GCP, enable delivery of standardised, secured, networked and identity integrated environments in hours not days. Instant access to a well designed cloud environment with necessary connectivity enables application teams to start working straight away.

What role should automation play in your cloud migration methods?

Environment automation is not enough. Smart IT leaders are demanding automation throughout  the entire lifecycle of an application. Building, testing and securing applications with tools like Azure DevOps or GitHub takes automation and hence repeatability and reliability to a new level. Containers are making automation available to legacy applications too. Nordcloud has built managed foundation solutions for both Azure DevOps and Kubernetes in order to significantly speed up and expand adoption of devops practices and application modernisation.

Fast, distributed IT also requires that the managed services provider makes it easy to automate provisioning and configuration of their toolset to manage things like data protection, patching, monitoring and so on. If the application team deploys with automation they should be able to configure back-up automatically as well. This is how we built our managed services offering.

Security remains a key consideration for a fast cloud computing migration strategy

The public cloud now runs all workloads including the most critical ones at heart of companies operations and data. Enabling fast IT requires appropriate security controls are in place and that information security assurance does not hinder but enables applications. As a customer you will need a partner that can guide you in your security objectives and implement required security related services from securing code, kubernetes, PaaS, hosts, cloud networks and applications. This is a quickly developing area with a large 3rd party technology ecosystem. Nordcloud has built security framework that simplifies both governing and managing security in the cloud.

Cloud migrations, especially lift and shift, are often seen as an act of changing the hosting arrangements but replicating the same operational mess you have on premise. This does need to be so if you choose the right partner. Enterprises can now build significant new capabilities in infrastructure automation, devops, software and application lifecycle automation, and security. When these capabilities are combined with powerful public cloud data tools, application modernisation also becomes cheaper and faster.

How can you drive faster time to value with your cloud migration?

Check out our latest Managed Cloud Migration Solution.