Moving from legacy internet-based environment to the modern Cloud applications is the need of the hour. Cloud based applications management provides some new dimensions in accessing and maintaining the software and hardware resources, data and other infrastructure.
When a company moves some or all of its data hosting and access capabilities into the cloud, this is termed as cloud migration. Applications on cloud are hosted on cloud-based infrastructure provided by a cloud service provider like Google Cloud, Azure or AWS. With the passage of time, more and more companies are moving on the cloud but every valuable thing comes at a cost and requires critical thought before a company makes an informed decision. Following are a few best practices which are being carried out during cloud application management.
Understand The Contract’s Terms And Conditions
You should make sure that your company adequately understands the content of cloud provider contract. It’s preferable to consult an epic legal and technical professional, before moving forward with those terms. A detailed review of cloud provider contracts can help understand provider expectations of the business relationship as well as information on who owns the data. You’ll want to avoid a cloud provider that assumes data ownership or doesn’t provide a sound guarantee for your data security. You have to make certain that your company maintains ownership of the data to avoid any questions of responsibility or intellectual property rights.
Don’t Abruptly Move Everything Into The Cloud
Consider Planning to move in well-defined phases when migrating your applications to the cloud. A gradual transition gives you the opportunity to test and troubleshoot the current phase of your move and before moving onto the next phase. This strategy not only ensures smooth transfer of your applications but also helps you avoid unnecessary downtime en route your migration to cloud.
The cloud is not an all-embracing solution and hence it is not a fair replacement for every sort of legacy application. Sometimes the desktop applications, which are yet performing well in their designated traditional environment should not be considered to be moved to cloud without taking into account all pros and cons.
Consider Adopting A Multi-Cloud Strategy
Single cloud platform solution makes things apparently simple, but it’s not scalable and soon you’ll realize the need of a multi-cloud solution. The cloud is, in essence, a collection of services that can be used together to meet varying business needs.
A multi-cloud strategy enables a scalable and flexible approach to provide specialized cloud service to each of the specific service need. A multi-cloud, for instance, may include two public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers, one public Platform as a Service (PaaS), and a private Container as a Service (CaaS) stack – to cover all business dimensions. A successful cloud implementation entails rigorous end-to-end cloud migration planning and management.
Establish an Application Management Strategy
Moving to the cloud entails a careful planning to manage application and scale performance over time. You need to ensure that the applications’ performance is closely observed by applying an application management strategy. Deployment of applications with an inadequate plan for how they will be managed may give rise to an unnecessary increase in complexity.
Ensure Adequate Backup And Disaster Recovery Measures
Your service could be time-critical and could not afford a shortest time-interval of failure or getting shut down. To address and mitigate application for service disruption or failure you have to arrange certain measures. Schedule backups of your application data and configuration is a common practice. In addition to a backup schedule, you should devise a well-planned and efficient restore mechanism so that the application should be in working order in the least possible time.
Your contract terms with your cloud service provider should provide sufficient guarantee to ensure adequate data security and failover management. An efficient and reliable failover mechanism calls for a disaster recovery infrastructure which involves both hardware and software. This is another layer of failover on the scheduled backup measure which ensures quick and reliable switching to the duplicate system in case of a catastrophe.
Data Security and Compliance
The migration process is itself prone to security risks. Migrating large volumes of potentially sensitive and confidential data across a different environment, creates significant exposure. Data security and compliance should always be taken with great care. Cloud services use a shared responsibility model, where the providers take the responsibility for securing the infrastructure, and the organization is supposed to be responsible for securing data and workloads.
In addition to real-time monitoring, you should also assess the security of the data to make sure that the operating under new environment meets regulatory compliance laws such as HIPAA and GDPR.
Conclusion
Cloud applications accompany challenges and require perpetual struggle to handle, but many can be mitigated with adequate planning. Transparency in pricing, security, reliability and disaster recovery are the key aspects in choosing the right provider for your application. The cloud providers that are capable to meet all your business requirements are yet very few in number. Consequently, going towards a multi-cloud solution can potentially meet all of your business needs so long as they’re planned to work in conjunction and perform as a unit. If you’re planning to run a medium or large-scale enterprise application on the cloud, where availability, reliability and security are the key parameters then moving to a multi-cloud is the best choice for you.
