Clearing the way for public cloud

Myles Payne

AWS Solution Specialist

Consider the conversations happening in our industry at the moment. You’ll likely have noticed that hybrid infrastructure and public cloud dominate.

Yet, for most organisations, cloud is still a new way of working. With the move away from on-site infrastructure towards everything being hosted in different locations with public cloud, it can be difficult to have visibility and control over your environment. It can also raise questions around the shared responsibility model between you and your vendors.

The challenge with public cloud

It isn’t simply a case of build it and it will come (although, with 73% of organisations struggling with cloud migration, moving to the cloud is certainly no straightforward task¹). Almost a third of all cloud spend is wasted,² which means that there is a need for greater understanding across the cloud journey.

The less glamourous parts of cloud adoption can often be forgotten – which has resulted in new challenges and obstacles when dealing with an on-demand world.

From the wider IT landscape to some of the issues our customers have come up against, we’ve seen three key points of consideration that can impact an organisation’s adjustment to a public cloud environment:

Commercial management and intelligence
Migration and modernisation
Operations and optimisation

These are three significant pillars that, with the right support and expertise, can help you to better utilise the possibilities of your hybrid cloud environment.

Commercial management and intelligence

This is potentially the biggest stumbling block we’ve seen for customers when migrating to cloud. Although it can be easy to set up in platforms, such as AWS, it can result in unforeseen costs, lack of governance and an environment that isn’t effective for an organisation’s ambitions and workloads.

We appreciate that consuming public cloud resources can be an unfamiliar landscape. If it’s a new way of procuring solutions for you, monthly invoicing and billing can be difficult to get used to, and it can be easy to lose track of what you’ve already deployed.

The first step is to find tools that enable you to see your full estate at once, instead of having to go through different areas of your environment to see what you’ve been spending, and where costs can be optimised. A partner can support with this.

Migration and modernisation

New environments can be complicated to adapt to. You may have found yourself needing to upscale your technology and operations teams – as the capabilities you now need have outgrown your resources.

It’s not uncommon to struggle to modernise workloads. And we’ve seen this among our customers. They build out their initial environment, but then aren’t sure how to migrate anything over, modernise what they want to migrate over, or scale once they’ve started on their public cloud journey. It’s not a simple cut and paste job. It requires a redesign of your full environment, with renewed consideration around what’s currently on site, security, licences and spend.

Although it can be relatively easy to set up an account in a cloud environment, without the right expertise and tools you may lose track of which stage you’re at, which workstreams you’ve moved over and how they’re working once they’re there. That’s why 67% of organisations are choosing to go with a partner to help with migration³.

It’s a challenging area which needs specialist IT resource that’s tailored to your company. We recommend that you look for a partner that offers a range of resources to help you assess your on-premises applications, and how you can monitor and deploy them.

Operations and optimisation

Once you’re in your public cloud environment, how can you take full advantage? You need to know what tools are out there and how to lead from an operations point of view. But keeping costs low, and utilising what you already have in place, can be complex.

It can be a long process of adapting to new ways of working and new technologies, and bringing in the right technical abilities. Many members of your teams may not understand where they fit in.

Having an environment that is secure and reliable is something that needs ongoing support in the public cloud. Without a partner supporting your teams, it can be difficult to know about new technology and hardware opportunities. Stay modern and up-to-date on the latest solutions by opting to work with a partner.

Support is out there

The cloud can seem like an isolated place. But you’re not alone. Choosing to work with a partner for public cloud is a step in a positive direction. At Softcat, we have many experienced chefs in our kitchen, working together to provide specialist support and assistance.

From plug-ins to strategy workshops and tailored solutions for different industries, we offer specific assessments and services to keep you operating effectively in a hybrid environment, including public cloud.

We’ve dedicated our time, software, products and resources to hybrid infrastructure, and we have experience working with hundreds of customers and all three major vendors. We know where stumbling blocks can appear and how to seamlessly overcome them.