Today, almost every IT organisation needs a cloud-first strategy to take advantage of the flexibility and scalability of cloud services and respond to the rapidly changing and unpredictable economy. Most of the time, public cloud use needs optimisation to deliver business results.

In short:

• Create a cloud-first plan that prioritises corporate goals like increased speed, reliability, and flexibility.
• Hybrid cloud architectures simplify implementation via the use of distributed clouds.
• Emphasise in-house public cloud training to fill the talent gap and explore other methods of finding new employees.

With a cloud-first strategy, tools and services work together to make it easy to get the job done. It lets you work from anywhere, and in the wake of the recent pandemic, cloud-first strategies and cloud computing have given employees a place remotely where they can access data, tools, and storage from anywhere in the world.
In the business world, putting the cloud first has become the norm. Businesses are switching to a cloud-first strategy to keep up with the constantly changing business world.

Cloud Migration comes from the need for flexibility, scalability, and security. This Technical post will explain what a cloud-first strategy means in 2023.

Why Should a Cloud-First Approach be Considered?

A cloud-first approach is a strategy that prioritises the use of cloud computing services and infrastructure over traditional on-premises systems. Take into consideration the following edges:

1. Cost savings: Cloud services can often be more cost-effective than maintaining your on-premises infrastructure, especially if you need to scale quickly or have fluctuating usage patterns.
2. Flexibility: Cloud services can be easily scaled up or down to meet changing demands, which can be useful if you have unpredictable or rapidly changing workloads.
3. Improved agility: With cloud services, you can quickly provision new resources and deploy new applications, which can help you respond faster to business needs.
4. Enhanced security: Many cloud providers offer robust security measures to protect your data and infrastructure, which can take more work to achieve with on-premises systems.
5. Increased collaboration: Cloud services often offer tools for collaboration and communication, which can be helpful if you have a distributed team or need to work with external partners.

In short, a cloud-first strategy can help organisations be more agile, responsive, and cost-effective. It enables them to take advantage of the many edges of cloud-first.

Things to consider when implementing a Cloud-First strategy

In 2023, new technologies will make it possible to improve cloud deployments and use them in ways. IT organisations should consider these six steps when building, implementing, and improving cloud-first strategies.

Step 1: Setup cloud-first strategies for speed and business value

In the current uncertain business world, companies must move quickly to take advantage of opportunities before their competitors. Cloud services are a big part of making the businesses they work with more flexible. As a result, they are more likely to succeed.

Regarding, professionals sometimes overlook the most crucial factor in favour of optimising technical structures: providing maximum business value in the least amount of time. Begin by relating your cloud plans to the following top CIO concerns:
Design and creation: Consider how the cloud can solve business problems and make a section for innovations.

Governance and security: Pay close attention to governance systems that can easily adjust to new situations and risk levels. 

Mobilisation and migration: Make plans to ensure the cloud is a success and to back the company-wide shift to the cloud.

Step 2: In multi-cloud setups, prioritise one service provider over the others.

By now, most businesses have fully operationalised at least a cloud-first IaaS or PaaS provider. This has led many to consider using a second cloud service for various needs. Flexible multicoloured methods are expensive and difficult to implement.

Plan where cloud workloads will move to save costs and complexity. Match cloud workloads to the correct cloud-first strategy. Choose a main, preferred supplier, and add other providers if the primary provider can’t satisfy company demands.

Step 3: Form strength into application architecture

Since cyber-attacks, such as ransomware, are happening more often. With the ongoing problems caused by the pandemic and other natural disasters and tragedies, IT resilience’s importance will only grow. Resilience gives you an edge over other people. If your competitors have delays and outages, but your company keeps running, your IT services have given you a chance to show how good your product is.

Embrace Cloud-first strategies by focusing on resilient application designs. Historically, operators ensured infrastructure dependability by integrating catastrophe recovery measures. Application code is quickly getting more reliable. 30% of businesses will add new IT resilience positions by 2025. They will raise overall dependability, tolerance, and recoverability by 45%.

Step 4: Enable hybrid architectures with spread cloud

IT businesses develop private and/or hybrid clouds for regulatory needs, data gravity, legacy infrastructure, personnel skill sets, or project deadlines. Private Cloud-first strategies fail due to complexity and unmanageability. Hybrid and private clouds seldom match organisations’ requirements for ease of use, service consumption, and integration.

Distributed cloud solves this problem. The solutions connect public cloud-first services to local infrastructure under the same management schema. These cloud services are transferred to hybrid and private cloud locations while keeping public cloud benefits.

Step 5: Cloud-native optimisation through containerisation and serverless computing

Initially, public cloud IaaS offers through virtual computers. Containers and serverless computing are novel virtualisation approaches. As cloud-first becomes more ingrained in application development and infrastructure management, containers and serverless will become appealing code deployment vehicles.

Service discovery, programmability, automation, observability, strong network connectivity, and security need cloud-native applications. Containers and serverless computing make it possible for each application to use its own resources. This Cloud-first strategy helps with flexibility, automation, efficiency, and reducing costs.

Step 6: Evolve cloud-first skills internally to bridge the talent gap

Even though public cloud infrastructure has been around for a while, I&O technical staff need to learn cloud skills faster to meet the growing demand for cloud services. As it gets harder to find skilled people, IT companies will have to train their employees on how cloud-first uses them. A lack of skills can slow down or stop a cloud project, which can slow down or stop innovation.

Consider creating a talent enablement programme (TEP) to improve IT skills and responsibilities. A TEP may assist in identifying the organisation’s talents, increase recruitment, and steer technical workers to the most important skills to develop or obtain.

Cloud-First does not mean Cloud Only

It’s important to note that a cloud-first strategy may mean something other than that an organisation will rely solely on cloud computing resources and services. Instead, the organisation prioritises cloud services over on-premises infrastructure when making technology and business operations decisions.

There are many situations where it may make sense for an organisation to continue using on-premises infrastructure in addition to cloud services. For example, an organisation may have certain applications or data that are sensitive or critical and require a high level of security, control, or compliance to only be achieved with on-premises infrastructure. Or, an organisation may have specific performance or latency requirements that are best met with on-premises infrastructure.

Ultimately, the decision about whether to use cloud services or on-premises infrastructure should be based on the specific needs and goals of the organisation. A cloud-first strategy means that the organisation is open to using cloud services. It is willing to consider them the first option when evaluating technology options.

Understand cost savings Cloud-First strategy 

There are several ways that a cloud-first strategy can lead to cost savings for an organisation:

1. Pay-as-you-go pricing: With cloud services, organisations only pay for the resources they use rather than investing in upfront costs for hardware, software, and maintenance. This can help organisations reduce their capital expenses and only pay for the resources they need when they need them.
2. Reduced energy costs: Cloud service providers typically have large, highly efficient data centres that use less energy than smaller, on-premises data centres. This can help organisations reduce their energy costs and their carbon footprint.
3. Reduced Infrastructure costs: By using cloud services, organisations can reduce the physical space they need for servers, storage, and networking equipment. This can help them save on real estate costs, such as rent or mortgage payments.
4. Increased efficiency: Cloud services are designed to be highly efficient and automated, which can help organisations reduce the time and effort required to manage their IT infrastructure. This can lead to cost savings in terms of labour costs and increased productivity.

Therefore, a cloud-first strategy can help organisations reduce their upfront and ongoing costs for hardware, software, energy, and real estate and increase their efficiency and productivity.

Cloud-First vs Cloud Only

Here is a step-by-step comparison of a cloud-first strategy versus a cloud-only strategy:

Limitations of Cloud-First

Here are some of the main limitations of a cloud-first strategy:
It’s important for organisations to carefully consider these limitations and potential risks when adopting a cloud-first strategy. It is necessary to have a contingency plan in place in case of issues with their cloud-based resources and services.

Cloud-first methodology of TECHOM Systems

TECHOM Systems help you implement a cloud-first strategy that would involve prioritizing the use of cloud computing services and solutions over traditional on-premises infrastructure to take advantage of the benefits of the cloud. This could involve moving as many applications, services, and workloads as possible to the cloud through Cloud Migration, cloud-native development, or hybrid cloud approaches.

To implement a cloud-first strategy with TOS, it would be important to carefully evaluate each workload’s business needs and requirements and determine the most appropriate cloud deployment model and cloud service provider. This could involve working with our team of experts to assess the suitability of different cloud solutions and assist with migrating and managing workloads in the cloud.

You can get in touch with TOS experts by:

Instantly Call us at +61 3 9005 6868
Email us at: hello@techomsystems.com.au

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“Adopting a cloud-first strategy with TECHOM Systems could help your organization enhance its agility and scalability”