25 Oct Cloud Computing: Strategies to Upgrade Business Application

Cloud computing solutions create massive opportunities to improve how businesses operate. These can and will disrupt business application’s strategies and architectures in more than one way.

Modern organizations are migrating to cloud-based solutions in order to leverage all the benefits that this innovative technology has to offer. The cloud technologies available today can influence business in one way or another, depending on how the organization decides to implement such transformation.

Today, companies can undertake this enriching transformation by using different strategies, some more costly yet benefiting than others. In the following lines, we will address how cloud computing will factor into business applications, especially by considering the available approaches to successfully complete the transformation.

Lift and Shift

Lift and Shift is the term used to refer to a straight-forward strategy based on migrating application workloads to the cloud solution as-is. When used, this strategy will consist in taking default processes and moving them to the new cloud-based solution.

As we can notice, Lift and Shift is the simplest, most straight-forward option out there. Nonetheless, being the simple alternative when migrating to the cloud, this doesn’t translate into greater benefit as applications will probably not make the most from the technologies available and will retain existing issues like inefficient resource usage and others.

In fact, using a Lift and Shift approach for the cloud transformation process may even lead to considerable problems and additional costs. The difference in technologies used in the cloud and lack of usage of cloud-native features can generate technical issues that will require additional work to solve.

Cloud-Enabled Virtualization

Cloud-Enabled Virtualization is an ideal approach for businesses with concrete plans of implementing innovative technologies but don’t want to invest in setting up and owning data centers.

To make it possible, this strategy involves adjusting and enhancing procedures to make the most of the cloud computing features available, upgrading operations with automation and cloud-native capabilities.

Indeed, the Cloud-Enabled Virtualization strategy requires extra work during the transformation phase. Data sanitization, for example, is a priority to make sure processes enjoy a stable, secure, and cost-effective environment. Yet, it’s a fantastic option that provides balanced benefits. Here, business applications will enjoy most of the perks of cloud computing.

DevOps Transformation

The most challenging yet beneficial approach when migrating to cloud computing is DevOps Transformation. This strategy involves revamping IT and business procedures with the cloud solution in mind. 

The tools and resources offered by DevOps will be used throughout the product’s development life cycle and now, powered by cloud computing and its automation capabilities, higher performance and quality can be achieved easily.

In order, to make it possible, the organization must go through a deep, comprehensive transformation that will disrupt every part of the business that is sensitive to or is slightly based on IT. The whole organization will be altered in order to support and be compatible with transformation cycles.