The adoption of cloud has increased exponentially over recent years. Yet, many organisations quickly discover that cloud migration doesn’t automatically improve efficiency, elasticity, and performance. Without a strategic approach toward migrating and managing workloads on the cloud, the overall time, risks, and costs associated with the move can quickly erode the desired benefits.
In this blog, we'll discuss the key factors that you need to keep in mind to maximise your investment in AWS cloud.
Clearly understand the scope and depth of the AWS platform
As the world's most comprehensive and widely adopted cloud platform, AWS cloud offers its customers a wide array of services. This means you need an in-depth understanding of the platform to leverage the entire breadth of services and innovation it provides and deliver the best solution for your organisation.
It takes experts with specialised skills and experience to devise a comprehensive strategy as well as build and optimise your cloud environment in a way that helps you achieve your desired outcomes—exactly according to your business aspirations.
Understand the intricacies of cloud security
A move to the cloud calls for a shift in your security strategy.
It is critical to understand that running applications and services in the cloud involves shared responsibilities for data security between the cloud provider and the customer. While the cloud provider remains responsible for the security of the cloud infrastructure, they have no control over how customers use the cloud service. For example, misconfiguration of infrastructure-as-a-service can often undermine provider security protocols, which adversarial actors can easily exploit to access valuable data.
Be sure to clearly understand which parts of the security protocols will be handled by AWS and which ones need to be taken care of by the organisation. Equally critical is creating the right internal processes, particularly around staff, to ensure they follow best data security and hygiene practices.
Ensure cloud compliance
Compliance management is another source of confusion for organisations during cloud migration. If not handled well, it can lead to regulatory penalties, cloud security threats, reputation damage, and violation of laws.
Organisations often find themselves in a situation where they need to store certain data in a specific region—mandated by specific regulations—which can be based on your jurisdiction, your industry, or the activities that your organisation employs to conduct business. In some cases, some data may not be deployed to the cloud at all. This means you cannot execute cloud migration until the necessary compliance mandates have been received.
Also, it’s critical to understand that the responsibility for ensuring compliance in the cloud is shared between the cloud provider and your organisation. Although AWS cloud has put in place a comprehensive set of compliance controls to fulfil various regulatory, legislative, and security standards and best practices, you still need to adopt the measures necessary to guarantee compliance.
Create a robust user identity and access management strategy
You can rely on AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to secure and manage access across the vast portfolio of AWS services and resources.
IAM is critical to establish basic security for enterprise resources, however, it can also pose some complexity for inexperienced cloud administrators. Following best practices can improve IAM effectiveness and help avoid common security mistakes.
Ensure you clearly understand how your data in the cloud is accessed and controlled. Look out for any lapses or anomalous behaviour in identity and access control. Adopt the principle of least privilege access—meaning users are allowed to access only the information and resources necessary to do their job and no more.
Optimise your cloud costs
You need to utilise AWS’s breadth of services and pricing options in a way that allows you to continuously optimise your cloud spend while still maintaining the performance and capacity you require.
It's therefore imperative to continuously rightsize and strategically utilise your compute resources to save big on cloud costs. Also, you should watch for sudden unanticipated spikes in cloud spend and proactively track anomalies. This will help you respond to cost challenges before they wreak havoc on your budget.
Leverage Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to Mitigate Downtime Expenses
Be sure to adopt all required measures to minimise the risk and cost of downtime. Incorporating Infrastructure as Code (IaC) methodologies in your organisation's practices significantly curtails the risk and associated costs of downtimes. With tools like CloudFormation, Terraform, AWS CDK, and Packer, continuous monitoring and management of your IT infrastructure through code enables optimal system performance and smooth execution of all business-critical processes. Implementing IaC not only supports rapid identification and prevention of security threats, but it also bolsters data compliance and cyber-security. Broadcast your AWS cloud investment potential by turning infrastructure management from a manual task into an automated, predictable, and scalable coding exercise with IaC.
Partner with a managed service provider
The above factors can be critical to achieving business objectives for organisations migrating workloads to AWS cloud. You can rely on your own IT staff to design, build, optimise, and manage your AWS environment. However, the process can be time-consuming, forcing your IT team to deprioritise other core business goals.
Professional Service Providers and Managed Service Providers bring the necessary expertise, services, and strategic direction to execute successful migration and management of workloads on the cloud. By mitigating the main obstacles and enhancing your environment, they help maximise your AWS investment. Furthermore, they enable your in-house teams to retain their focus on pushing boundaries and fostering innovation.
Get to know how the Adaptavist team can help you get a better grip on your AWS environment. If you’re looking to host Atlassian Data Centre and/or GitLab on AWS to fulfil and advance your business objectives, teaming up with an experienced AWS Partner like Adaptavist is highly recommended. Our expert team can help align your cloud strategy with your business needs, ensuring security, compliance, and cost-effectiveness.
