Advantages and Disadvantages of Migration to the Private Cloud

Migration to the private cloud as a strategy for strengthening infrastructure and business, gaining agility, flexibility, and processing capacity, subcontracting complexity thanks to a pushed digitalization.

However, this choice presents many difficulties for those responsible for systems and services.

How and why cloud migration pays off

Organizations can use the private cloud to gain greater control of resources, increase security levels, and better ensure business continuity. In addition, private clouds are often much more personalized than the needs of the organization that choose to operate in public clouds.

Given the numerous advantages, the most important brake on migration to the private cloud by companies is the lack of internal skills. As a result, you often rely on a third-party service provider.

“The migration to the private cloud makes it essential to develop a series of internal skills explained Sriram Subramanian, IDC analyst, directly or through partners who bring this expertise”.

Regardless of whether an organization decides to create its own local cloud or turn to a provider, there are steps to be followed when migrating to the private cloud. Buy-in by stakeholders (e.g. managers and IT managers) is essential for any shift of one or more workloads on the clouds. Before setting goals, buying software, or taking a beta test, leadership must agree on migration to the private cloud by following a few key steps to enable self-service features, bringing benefits to the organization.

Expert advice for cloud migration

System administrators need a plan before moving workloads. “It is essential to clarify the corporate objectives, of which the common ones include the optimization of TCO (Total Cost Ownership), reiterated Subramanian, the increase in scalability and agility, the reduction of time to market and the decentralization of the IT. There is also much to be said about adopting an as-a-service model, which administrators should consider as part of the planning process.

One of the inhibitors to cloud migration is the internal resistance of IT administrators who tend to consider an as-a-service model or self-service provisioning as a limit to their control. These models can also change the way organizations spend IT budgets, as they generally use a chargeback system, which may require recalibration of accounting procedures and budget allocation.”

The role of administrators

In an optimal private cloud, configuration added Subramanian IT administrators continue to play a central role by overseeing the activities of the infrastructure and the relative timing. On the other hand, it would be useful to convince other parts of the organization to adopt this IT distribution model.

The administrator should also understand the organizational goals and context that are moving to the private cloud. This helps the organization to align departments in order to effectively manage workloads and infrastructures while moving to an As a Service model.

Inventory and document everything

Another key step for migrating to the cloud is collecting data to form an adequate distribution strategy. During the collection process, administrators must inventory and document systems, applications, licenses, available skills, service level agreements (SLAs) and even depreciation tables for existing investments.

Beware of private cloud costs in the short term

Warning: experts warn. Migration to the private cloud should not be seen as an effort to cut costs, on the contrary: in the short term, budgets may have to be enhanced to support some stages of the transition.

As experts point out, although organizations have a higher initial cost for private cloud, they will not really get all the benefits unless they and managers adopt a mindset that considers cloud migration as a step towards setting up a digital business.

Functional agility thanks to a selection of tools

If organizations consider things like scaling cloud infrastructure, enabling DevOps logic, using infrastructure as code, or introducing containerization, administrators can go beyond the lift-and-shift mentality. If the public cloud is better known when it comes to IT service innovation, the private cloud can implement features more efficiently if you know how to select the right tools.

Unless it’s a very small organization, most administrators don’t have the final choice in selecting the cloud as the decision is still up to the C-Levels. However, administrators can guide decision-makers in the best way, providing both the technical requirements and the criteria for choosing the most suitable platform based on the business requirements.

Back up & co: different times according to the workload

Another key aspect is setting up a plan for cloud backup. There are many possible approaches, but a good starting point is to evaluate recovery point and recovery time to determine the best way to manage backup workflows when the organization moves to a private cloud.

The time required to move a workload depends on its nature and the internal competence of an organization. Administrators can move applications grouped together, closely matching calculation and data as they are or with minimal configuration changes. Applications that require refactoring in native or cloud-based architectures take longer to migrate because the software code needs to know to use cloud-based resources. My advice? Whenever possible, use automation to speed up the process.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it is important that administrators carefully consider the available private cloud technologies to ensure that they select what the organization and their team need, properly planning all stages of migration to the cloud.