“Cloud computing is in its beginning stages and will only continue to grow, Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky told CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Tuesday.” (June 28th, 2022)
Even if you currently don’t have a comprehensive cloud strategy, regardless of the reason, there is a justification for doing a “proof-of-concept” in the cloud for at least one application of significance in your app portfolio.
Here are a few top reasons companies cite why they don’t move to the cloud. Of course, there could be many others, but these are popular.
- Costs (cost of the cloud service, plus implied costs like network connectivity)
- Your applications are antiquated and based on mainframe or mid-range servers.
- Security
- “If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.”
Even if you have reasons for not moving to the cloud, let’s look at why you might want to do a cloud POC (proof-of-concept) for one of your on-prem applications.
- Things change, companies merge, companies are bought out, new Executives come and go, world politics, etc. The point is that the cloud is a legitimate IT strategy. So all organizations of size should investigate new technology options as part of an ongoing modern IT strategy. Even if you don’t have a legitimate reason to go “all in,” you should at least be familiar with the cloud just in case “things change.”
- If your organization is more traditional, doing a POC in the cloud will give your people a chance to enhance their skills. Skill and talent retention are significant concerns, so doing the cloud POC will allow everyone to gain knowledge and experience.
- Doing a POC in the cloud will reveal the “true costs” of what it takes to support one application, which can then be used as a factor to estimate a larger cloud footprint in the future. For example, in addition to the cloud service, networking costs to connect your on-prem to the cloud service must be factored in.
- A cloud POC will help reveal any issues regarding security, data sovereignty, and control. You may discover that the cloud has more and better security options than what is currently on-prem.
- A future path to the cloud might be revealed as part of the cloud POC. A hybrid cloud approach is the potential first step. Lift and shift the core application as-is. Isolated services like application file storage are good candidates to be moved to native cloud-based services, and this approach would minimally disturb the original application architecture. IE: Take tiny steps.
Taking a single potential secondary application and migrating that one application will help reveal all your current “unknowns” about the cloud. Pre-conceived biases and assumptions might be disproven or proven. But by doing that one single project, you’ll have something you didn’t have before.
You will have actual data.
A final quote from the article cited above:
“Essentially, IT is going to move to the cloud. And it’s going to take a while. You’ve seen maybe only, call it 10% of IT today move. So it’s still day 1. It’s still early. … Most of it’s still yet to come,” he said.