Moving from on-premise tools to cloud computing solutions is a top priority for many businesses in the current environment. These tools can offer a wide range of benefits, from lower costs to greater flexibility, and have become the first choice for many critical IT operations.
One of the most important forms of cloud computing for many organizations will be Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), the backend infrastructure vital for running an IT network, and will include shifting resources such as servers, storage, networking and virtualization tools to the cloud.
According to research by Gartner, this is the fastest-growing sector of the cloud market, with the research firm forecasting it to grow by 24% year-on-year in 2020, compared with growth of 17% for the public cloud market as a whole. By the end of this year, it predicted IaaS revenue will reach $50 billion, before surpassing $74 billion by the end of 2022.
There are numerous reasons for the growth in popularity of IaaS. One of the main reasons is because it’s often easier, faster and more cost-efficient to secure these resources in the cloud than it would be to build and maintain an on-premise data center.
Cloud infrastructure also promises much greater flexibility to users, enabling them to easily scale their operations up and down to cope with fluctuating demand or the changing needs of a growing business.
With this in mind, here are a few key factors you need to be aware of before undertaking such a consequential move for your business. Ensuring you have complete answers to the questions below will help make the move as efficient and stress-free as possible and set up your enterprise well for the years to come.
The first step will be determining which of your workloads will be best-suited to being migrated to the cloud. Some firms may wish to take all of their infrastructure tools and move them to these services, but this may not always be advisable or practical depending on the type of operations you have.
For example, some legacy applications may rely on operating systems that aren't compatible with the cloud, or still depend on physical hardware. This doesn't mean they can't be migrated to the cloud, but it will involve extra time and effort to transform them into a workable solution. You'll have to decide whether to keep them where they are, take the time to make the necessary changes, or even consider upgrading to more cloud-focused alternatives.
It's therefore vital to conduct a full audit of your existing IT infrastructure to build an accurate picture of where your applications are located and what infrastructure they depend on. This can also help you identify which parts of your operations will be particularly well-suited to IaaS platforms. For instance, look for workloads that have high spikes in demand at certain times, as you can improve your performance significantly by making these a priority for migration.