Technology Planning: Cloud Optimization

Having a standard set of guidelines in place for selecting your cloud solution and determining future new application protocols is an important first step.

• Create a questionnaire to gather all data relevant to the decision process.

• Weigh your IT needs against potential cloud platform metrics.

• Factor in CAPEX versus OPEX expenditures.

• Narrow down to 2 or 3 viable options.

• Determine which option best aligns with organizational goals. 

• Recognize that no decision is ever final, but this is right for now.

• Move forward and start the implementation process.

After selecting your cloud solution, thoroughly outline resource utilization and consumption requirements.

• Review utilization of on-premises resources, including legacy applications.

• Map on-premises resources to the cloud.

• Engage in a cloud readiness assessment.

• Assign readiness scores to every virtual machine based on performance and age of infrastructure.

• Use scores to determine storage tiers, what can move to the cloud and what stays on-premises.

• Implement cloud migration plan.

During and after implementation, continually monitor for infrastructure changes, security concerns and workload issues.

• Perform routine utilization maintenance and test development environment to ensure VMs are running correctly.  

• Assess whether the current configuration meets business and IT goals.

• Practice good data hygiene to ensure architecture is correct, resources are tagged correctly and network/WAN can handle the load.

• As employees change over, reassess access permissions and security protocols.

• Embrace application performance monitoring to test for latency.  

• Leverage best practices by training staff on cloud changes and conducting periodic health checks.