The clock is ticking and every organisation should be feeling the pressure to move quickly along its digital transformation journey.
Organisations that are slow to digitise their offerings and operations will find themselves competing for a progressively shrinking share of their respective market segment’s opportunities. Now is the time to recognise that cloud will lead the charge on the journey to becoming a truly digital enterprise.
The latest industry predictions released by International Data Corporation (IDC) show that enterprise spending on cloud services and infrastructure will be more than $530 billion by 2021. These figures are phenomenal in anyone’s books, and organisations around the world should be collectively leaning in to avoid major market pressures in years to come.
Indeed, enterprises worldwide are already moving towards a cloud-first strategy with the promise of benefits like agility, scalability, and innovation-at-speed. Australia is a dominant leader in this shift to a cloud mentality, with ABS statistics showing almost one-third of Australian businesses now operate in the cloud—an increase of more than 13 per cent since 2014.
With cloud maturity increasing in Australia, there’s no greater proof for those sitting on the fence when it comes to cloud adoption. This is no longer just about economics and agility. Successful cloud migration is becoming enterprises’ most critical and dependable source of sustained technology innovations.
Spending for cost-savings
It may seem like an oxymoron, but in the technology business, often you have to spend money to save money.
Regardless of the benefits of agility, scalability and rapid innovation, the cost savings alone can be phenomenal. Indeed, cost savings are often recognised as the single biggest benefit of migration to cloud infrastructure.
This is because cloud customers can purchase specific applications on a pay-as-you-go basis without the need for a long term commitment. This elasticity is rare in a world pushing everyone to make commitments when purchasing in the corporate world, which can be priceless for organisations dipping their proverbial toe into the cloud world for the first time.
In the long term, the operational efficiencies cloud brings to enterprise equate to massive cost savings over time, with decreased infrastructure costs and greater ease of collaboration across large workforces.
Mitigating the risks
Migrating to the cloud comes with certain challenges too, such as security, compliance, performance, and more. It’s a highly-complex undertaking, and the more intricate the enterprise architecture, the higher the occurrence of failure between the various different environments.
It’s critical for businesses to understand the types of application and infrastructure monitoring, analytics and performance needed to ensure a successful migration. Making sure application performance monitoring (APM) and management is addressed is imperative for a cloud migration to be effective.
Much of this has to do with the level of pre-move testing an enterprise is willing to undertake to maximise success of the migration. For example, a primary risk of cloud migration is downtime and adverse effect on the user experience during the time of migration. Testing and managing these performance issues in the planning phase will ensure there are no nasty surprises during migration.
APM is the key to success
Making smarter migration decisions is all about monitoring and analysing the performance of cloud migration as it happens. APM gives enterprises real-time, end-to-end data about users, transactions, code and infrastructure to arm them with the information they need to support an application’s migration to the cloud, whilst also providing optimal experiences and decreasing security risks.
Applications across an enterprise can be hugely complicated and widely distributed, and APM provides a breadth of visibility into the dependencies and user experiences to help accelerate the often taxing process of cloud migration planning. IT teams typically find themselves under scrutiny about proving ROI. Post-move technical KPI assessments (which APM provides) is a tidy way to prove migration success to a nervous or sceptical leadership team.
The key here is to be prepared. The cloud plays a pivotal role in digital transformation, and it’s up to organisations to put steps in place to ensure they’re not labelled a digital dinosaur, and that their journey to cloud is seamless and with no negative impact on user experience.