By Dan Beauregard, VP of Product Management, CloudSphere
Regardless of the size of your organisation, your company’s applications and data are sensitive and critical to the success of your business. It’s something that you must keep secure, highly available and running efficiently at all times.
Migrating your data, therefore, comes with risk. It can also put your business operations on hold if the journey is not completed as quickly and effectively as possible.
When done correctly, there are many positive drivers for moving your infrastructure to the cloud, including:
- Reduced operating costs
- The ability to scale when needed
- Global accessibility for employees and customers
- Enhanced security of your data
To experience these benefits, however, there are several steps you must first take to successfully complete your digital transformation.
From auditing your existing data centre to modernising and securing your software, CloudSphere can help you de-risk and accelerate your journey to the cloud.
5 Ways to Successfully Migrate to the Cloud
Migrating IT estates efficiently and securely are two of the top priorities for just about any company—tech or otherwise.
As a certified partner of both Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, CloudSphere is dedicated to ensuring that your cloud journey causes your businesses as little friction and disruption as possible.
With our Cyber Asset Management (CAM) platform, you can assess, plan and execute your complex cloud journeys faster than ever before, without additional security threats. In fact, our platform enables you to actually de-risk your digital transformation.
The Interactive Consoles on our SaaS platform empowers your organisation to have access to your data through user-friendly dashboards and real-time reporting. This can help you substantially lower the risks involved in your migration planning, as well as the actual execution of your cloud journey.
When working with our team, this includes the following five phases:
- Discovery
- Planning
- Optimising
- Modernising
- Securing
Through these five stages, CloudSphere helps de-risk your cloud journey, while saving your organisation time and money throughout the process.
1. Automated Discovery
Removing potential threats from your digital journey first involves understanding your data infrastructure, digital applications, and the dependencies between them. A discovery and auditing phase is crucial to the security of your migration.
During this stage of the cloud journey, CloudSphere offers a variety of tools to automatically discovery on-prem and multi-cloud assets. For example, CloudSphere’s Interactive Console provides critical insights and actionable recommendations.
Automating discovery helps reduce the amount of time your team spends on the cumbersome task of auditing your current IT estate, potentially saving your company hundreds of hours of work. Removing the need for your employees to manually perform this step also significantly reduces cost and the possibility of human error.
Through CloudSphere’s automated discovery process, we also help you identify dependencies. Dependency mapping is then combined with the auto-detection of applications and business services. Together, these components de-risk the entire process and improve how long it takes to create a plan robust enough to conduct an effective migration.
2. Migration Planning
Utilising CloudSphere’s agentless discovery and service mapping, your business services are automatically captured as a comprehensive list. From physical, legacy, and virtual to cloud-native services, this list helps you create a comprehensive plan that maps out your cloud migration and transformations.
Specifically, through CloudSphere’s Migration Planning Dashboard, your data is interpreted into feature-rich, interactive consoles, alleviating the need for your team to manually plan your cloud journey.
You can also customise your consoles within our platform and leverage components like our Automated Assessment Report. This feature generates a detailed report of your IT Estate along with CloudSphere’s migration recommendations to ensure you are able to successfully act on your migration project.
Key outputs of the Automated Assessment Report include:
- Pricing Comparisons
- Business Service Optimisation
- Migration Metrics
- 6R Strategy Recommendations
- Service Dependency Maps
- Wave Plans
By guiding users through the process, our planning module is driven by CloudSphere’s Migration Recommendation Framework (CMRF). The CMRF utilises your discovered and derived data to create prioritised migration wave plans.
This results in recommendations that help de-risk your migration and allow you to more effectively plan the journey of your assets in stages. These recommendations also help reduce unnecessary disruption to your business operations.
3. Optimising Cloud
Cloud optimisation does not end once you have migrated. It is an ongoing process that is critical to keep your environment running efficiently. Continual optimisation also allows you to better control the expenses associated with cloud costs.
With CloudSphere, your organisation has access to a real-time optimisation dashboard that can help you keep your environment in check. From ongoing cloud instance rightsizing to reclamation recommendations, you’ll have all the info you need to understand and evaluate your expenses.
You can also leverage our growing security and compliance checks to make sure you are meeting the best practices of cloud providers.
Our platform helps you rest assured that your environment is not costing you more than it should and that it’s continuously protected.
4. Modernising Environments
In addition to helping you optimise your digital transformation, CloudSphere also offers recommendations for modernising your infrastructure. This phase of your journey enables you and your business to take advantage of the latest cloud technologies.
From complete cloud environments like Platform as a Service (PaaS) that include everything you need to build, run, and manage applications to packages of software like containers, our team can help you modernise your IT estate.
Through this process, you will also be protecting your organisation’s investments. Cloud and application modernisation enables you to refresh your software portfolio and take advantage of contemporary infrastructure, tools, languages and other progressions in cloud technologies.
5. Securing IT Estates
Security concerns do not go away once you are in the cloud. It is a shared responsibility between the customer and the cloud provider, and it must be an ongoing process to ensure your data is protected at all times.
CloudSphere’s solution continues to de-risk your data, preventing misconfigurations with impactful security and compliance consequences.
Based on your dynamic risk context, we provide you actionable security and compliance dashboards to help keep your data secure. As a result, you can quickly discover potential vulnerabilities with automated real-time inspection technology and prioritise remediation based on our knowledge of your critical business services.
Start Your Cloud Journey Today
Migrating your digital infrastructure into the cloud can seem like a large and overwhelming undertaking. But with CloudSphere’s automation and powerful rules engine, you can handle your business’ digital transformation with far less risk and a lot less friction.
CloudSphere can help you remove protentional threats from your organisation’s migration by simplifying your discovery process, auto detecting your critical services, building your interactive data consoles, and helping you create a prioritised migration plan.
