When you’re migrating applications and data to the cloud, you want to use the cloud services that best meet your needs so your migration goes as smoothly as possible. In order to ensure you get the most out of the cloud once migrated, you need to know that you are getting as many of the advantages of the cloud as possible.
With that in mind, here are 10 things your cloud service or services should provide to ensure that your cloud migration is quick, smooth, and gives you the major advantages of moving into the cloud.
Migrating to the cloud means you should be able to deploy your apps and services more quickly. Many services provide the ability for you to quickly provision servers and other resources within a few steps, which tends to be a much simpler process than buying servers, installing the needed operating system, and placing it into a network or data center.
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Source: Edwin Schouten, Cloud Services Leader for IBM Global Technology Services, Benelux region
Most cloud providers take care of some of the tougher security issues, such as keeping unwanted traffic outside a specific scope from accessing the machines on which your data and apps reside and ensuring automatic security updates are applied to their systems to keep from being vulnerable to the latest known security threats.
Keep in mind, though, that you will still need to have security policies in place on your end, such as keeping mobile devices secure, making sure employees don’t divulge passwords or other sensitive information to unauthorized parties, and so on.
Cloud systems tend to peel away the complexity of the infrastructure that underlies the architecture being used to provision new machines and make them all work together to provide the needed services. Instead, you are able to fill out some information on what is needed and launch the necessary services. This can save quite a bit of time, as those particular complexities are no longer a part of your process.
A number of cloud services are able to provide monitoring so that you can be notified when an app or machine has potential issues or is actually experiencing an outage. This, of course, can save you quite a bit of time as opposed to keeping track of the state of your services on your own.
Related to monitoring, backup and logging services are extremely important, especially if you need to perform disaster recovery from an outage and see where things went wrong. The backups will allow you to get things up and running again, and the logs may provide some critical information to help you find out what caused the issue in the first place.
A good cloud service can make all of these things appear as though they are shown through a ‘single piece of glass’. Thus, workload deployment, monitoring, and mobility are all able to be taken care of in a single location as opposed to having to go through several different services that don’t necessarily use a common interface for the user.
With cloud services, your team won’t need to be at a specific location to deploy, update, or fix issues with any of the various machines being used. This makes it a more flexible solution when compared to the necessity of being on-site. Also, the consistency of the provisioning and deployment processes the cloud provides can make it much easier to collaborate, as everyone can be on the same page, without shadow IT.
By making use of the cloud, you can potentially reduce the number of data centers needed in your organization. Instead, you may be able to get by with one data center for particularly sensitive information, or even zero if that is not needed in your case. This, of course, can help save on the costs of operating multiple data centers.
For Netflix, this has proven to be quite effective at improving system availability, optimizing costs, and in some cases reducing latencies.
Source: Netflix
Some cloud providers also are able to provide autoscaling, which allows you to provision more services when needed while turning them off when they are not needed. This highly responsive technique can help even more with cost savings, as you only need to be charged for the time those additional systems are on instead of having to keep additional machines up and running all the time to deal with peak loads. In this way, your services can automatically respond with the number of resources needed at any given time, preventing both downtime and unnecessary expense!
If you are looking to get all of these cloud advantages and make your cloud migration better, why not try Morpheus, which provides all of these services in a single platform. Morpheus allows you to provision databases and servers quickly, and have your app up and running in no time!
Morpheus allows you to place workload deployment, monitoring, and mobility behind a single pane of glass. Morpheus provides automatic monitoring, backups, and logging, so that you can focus on your app rather than all of the other complexities involved in the architecture, and also provides autoscaling services so that you can optimize the resources needed for your apps at any given time.
In addition, Morpheus has a clear, concise, easy-to-use interface that makes accomplishing your tasks a breeze.
The Morpheus interface is clean and easy to use. Source: Morpheus.
So, with all of these advantages, why not register an account today and take advantage of all that the cloud has to offer?
