For many, it may feel that the journey to the private cloud is overwhelming, with many steps to take and hurdles to overcome.
While many companies have waxed lyrical about the cloud and its benefits for more than a decade, there are unsurprisingly still many organisations that have remained hesitant to dip their toes into the cloud, whether it be public, private or hybrid.
At Brightsolid, we are seeing more customers adopt the public cloud. And they aren’t the only ones: IDC estimates that the public cloud market grew more than 24% year over year in 2020 and brought in revenues of around $312 billion. This has been boosted by the ease of use, as well as the accessibility of hyper-scale cloud providers (HCP) like AWS.
Starting the journey
The path to cloud adoption and innovation can be exciting, the possibilities endless. Whether looking to take advantage of IoT or AI; do more with less; or scale your infrastructure according to business demand, there are many ways in which the cloud can support your goals. Whatever sits at the core of your programme, it can be enthralling to see your project get off the ground with the wider team supporting the vision. However, when external challenges start to rear their heads (think governance, procurement, or security), this can make or break a project.
Before such an event throws you off course, there are three core steps that you can take that will ensure you stay on track and can work towards achieving your cloud potential.
1 – Be clear on your role
An HCP doesn’t have full responsibility for the management and monitoring of your cloud. Instead, there is shared responsibility between them and you. Being clear on this from the outset will limit any upset to you or the wider organisation down the line.
Put simply, you are responsible for the security and compliance OF the cloud, whereas the HCP is responsible for the security and compliance IN the cloud. Get this wrong, and your data could be compromised.
2 – Create a solid foundation
This is directly related to step one: you must create the right conditions upon which a solid foundation can be built to ensure agility while meeting security and compliance needs. Indeed, this is the only way to ensure a strategy that can grow with your business over time.
We’ve launched Cloud Foundations to allow organisations to quickly launch secure and compliant AWS clouds, removing the complexities often associated with AWS cloud deployments. It helps organisations who want to use the public cloud to fuel their business transformation, but may be concerned about where to start and may not have the relevant in-house skills or knowledge to fully explore how the public cloud could benefit them.
3 – Skill up
Finally, should you find that you lack the skills internally to be able to do all of this, seek help. However, we live in an IT skills gap which no one is immune to – even AWS currently has 700 vacancies for cloud experts alone, never mind data scientists, coders or developers.
Should you find yourself in a skills bind, a third party such as managed service providers can be the answer to this, with skilled individuals who can support your business at whatever stage it is in its cloud journey – from inception to implementation.
Ultimately, there is counsel and support available in the market to accelerate your AWS journey – it’s just about knowing who you can call on.
Read our whitepaper to find out how Brightsolid can support your business on its AWS journey.