8 Best Practices for Successful Cloud Implementation

The fast-growing digital economy, evolving technology landscape, and changing customer demographics are forcing organizations to be flexible, scalable, and agile. And that is why cloud has become vital for organization's success, providing the agility and scalability needed to adapt to market conditions. As the cloud offers many benefits, it is natural that you look to leverage its capabilities. No doubt, implementing cloud can be a game-changing move, but do you think your organization is ready for successful cloud implementation? If not, some best practices related to cloud implementation should be considered.

Best practices for successful cloud implementation:

1. End-to-End Assessment:

Identifying where you’re today and where you want to reach through the cloud is the first and the critical step for successful cloud implementation. Begin with assessing your current environment and imagining the future by identifying organization readiness, risks, costs, and opportunities, with moving to the cloud.

2. Choose the right cloud deployment model:?

Select the right cloud deployment model - Public, Private, or Hybrid, based on your business objectives. Since your data and systems will be hosted on the selected cloud model, it is important to analyze your computing requirement, networking and storage requirement, and current resources to get the most out of the cloud.

3. Opting the right cloud computing model:?

Just like selecting the right cloud deployment model, it is imperative to choose the cloud computing model that is right for your business. There are mainly three cloud computing models namely Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), and each model solves specific enterprise cloud challenges.

4. Assessing Security and Data:?

Before moving to the cloud, you need to evaluate two critical factors - Security Compliance and Data Criticality. Security compliance defines your organization’s ability to secure and control access to sensitive data and ensure legal compliance. On the other hand, Data criticality refers to the ability of your organization to protect data from being tampered.?

5. Follow a Cloud Governance Framework:?

A successful cloud implementation will depend on your ability to ensure accountability, governance, and control. By developing a cloud governance framework, you have the right tools, systems, and programs in place to move your workloads to the cloud. It also enforces the correct policies to ensure your employees utilize the cloud effectively and safely.

6. Start with a single workload:?

Although moving all your workloads to the cloud at one time seems profitable, it also includes some risks, alerting you to start small. Select a workload or function you think will benefit most and move it to the cloud. Then slowly expand to additional workloads once the model is proven.

7. Automate as much as possible:

Given the time-consuming factor for cloud implementation, it is wise to automate as many aspects as possible to reduce efforts as well as operating costs. By automating provisioning, configuration, and management of your cloud-based infrastructure, you can save precious time and resources and drive innovation.

8. Monitor and Optimize:?

Successful cloud journey doesn’t end at implementation. For long-lasting returns, you must evaluate, monitor, and manage cloud-based services, applications, and infrastructure. Investing in modern monitoring tools can drive cost optimization, ensure security compliance, and improve performance.?

Having a cloud-first mindset can help improve cloud cost management, data security, disaster recovery, cloud monitoring, and more. However, the journey to the cloud is full of obstacles, and one should have the right strategy or approach to emerge as a winner. By embracing cloud best practices, organizations can reduce the risks associated with cloud implementation while reducing costs and improving performance.