Take Incharge of YOUR Public Cloud

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When you read this title may make you think, the blogger is coming from a traditional on-premise background or the blogger yet to understand PaaS and SaaS offerings and still talking about only IaaS offering in Public Cloud. For those who are not convinced with the title, let me take you on a short journey into completely something different.

Say that you are working in Cloud and earn a lot, so you wanted to build a house in an urban area where you have bought a small land and it’s also easy to commute to work. What would you do to secure your land? Probably put up a fence with one or two gates, so people only can enter via gates, of course, we are not talking about people who jump over the fence. Then you would know those who can enter your land via gate treated as more trusted than the people seen outside your land, so you don’t have to put a massive door for your house again!

Now things have changed in your life and now you decided, you had enough with the computer screen and Cloud world, and decide to leave all and do some farming! Having said that, I am not reading anyone’s mind here! Obviously, your urban area land would not scale for farming. So now you go and find a massive piece of land in a very remote area. Once you bought the land, you found out it’s a hostile environment with the presence of all wild animals and poisonous creatures. The only reason you went for a remote area is because of scale, but unintentionally you have inherited additional risk in going into a remote wilderness area. Just because you have this massive land, would you go and build the house and farm straight away or would you make sure your area is secure enough before you can start any building work?

Hope that created some thought process around adopting public Cloud when you want to migrate from your managed data centres. Public Clouds were introduced to solve two specific problems.

1. Agility
2. Scale

In order to get both of these benefits without introducing extra risk, you will need to conscious build sufficient guardrails like what you would do in the farmhouse scenario before you can build and put your data there. This is exactly what I referred in the title as taking control of your public cloud.

In order to prepare yourself on this journey, you will need to understand your risk appetite and the controls you needed in the Cloud, so you do not increase your risk appetite by moving into the Cloud.

If you already have an established on-premise environment then you will also need to have a clear strategy for your hybrid model, as obviously, it’s now imminent it takes months and mostly years to migrate completely from your on-premise, but still, you will have your people accessing various services from your offices that also needs to be considered.

The specific areas around taking control of your public cloud and hybrid strategies are topics on their own in order to give meaningful insights with examples, so there will be other blogs here that take you to the next level if you are convinced to move on of course 🙂