In the third and final part of my blog series I thought I would share my experience from the many cloud migration and ongoing optimisation projects I’ve worked on. Below, I've summarised the 3 key areas you need to focus on to shape your cloud migration strategy and to increase your chances of cloud migration success. 

1.Start with a Solid Foundation

When an organisation begins to adopt cloud services, it is crucial that a carefully planned set of cloud specific controls and standards are implemented.  This ensures the consumption of cloud services happens in a standardised and manageable way, avoiding future issues.

To do this, we break the engagement into two phases:

• Azure Enterprise Scaffold – designs the fundamental cloud platform while establishing a governance framework that includes guidance for deploying compliant solutions from the beginning. This includes a High-Level Design (HLD) for a hybrid environment and configuration for fully governed subscriptions including policy and security management features, user access controls and many others.
• Azure FastStart – using input from the Scaffold stage, we quickly and securely lay the foundations for cloud services using templates and methodologies that Telefónica Tech UK experts have created and tested.  This will include connectivity to the Microsoft Azure Cloud and the configuration of cloud networks to logically extend Apax on-premises environment to Azure, extension of the on-premises Active Directory Domain to the cloud and deployment of a Hybrid identity solution, with the relevant approach being based on the output of the Design workshop.

2. Monitor for Overspend

Overspend is often the biggest post project business problem. The economics of Public Cloud are more complex than on-premises. When running your own datacentre, you buy all your capacity up front and allocate the resources, soviet-style across the board!

Where as Public Cloud is more like a market economy. In this scenario resources are allocated by price and geared to what’s most important. Everything needs a reason to be there and should be run as efficiently as possible.

But this doesn’t happen by magic, no, cloud optimisation is continuous. This is something we commit to do for our Microsoft CSP customers. Outside of our CSP family, we have the technology to help you optimise Cloud costs as part of an Enterprise Agreement or other CSP based cloud workloads.

3. Use Azure DevOps for Greater Control

Another customer I work with outsources the development of its applications. So, they were particularly interested in the way developers access and consume cloud environments.

In this example, Azure DevOps can be invaluable. The beauty of Azure DevOps is that it is perfectly possible to keep developers within the GitHub repository without any access to Azure at all. This means all jobs and code are submitted via the repository with approval given by key personnel ‘on the inside’.

In the customer example above, this successfully prevented uncontrolled virtual machines spinning-up all over the place.

The other key benefit of Azure DevOps is that is delivers zero-trust security: The resources being deployed - even to test environments - are being deployed by ‘approvers’ and not the identities of the developers in question.

If you would like to understand more about a Cloud Economic Assessment or Cloud Readiness Assessment, please get in touch.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of this blog series