Challenges and benefits of cloud migration

When it comes to migrating to the cloud, Tomasz Wartalski, chief innovation officer at Conotoxia, offers some ideas on the advantages and how to overcome potential issues.

The reasoning behind the migration of a company’s IT resources to the cloud is based on three pillars. Of these, one is agility. Companies that choose to take this step instead of building new systems and operations can utilize everything that cloud technologies already offer.

Having a global footprint is another fundamental factor that brings a business much more quickly to any part of the world with the cloud. To this list, we should also add automatic scalability, through which there is no longer a need to manage resources manually.

Jump to:

The benefits of cloud migration

Migrating a company to the cloud is usually accompanied by the intention to exploit its competitive advantages. When opting for such a solution, the business first wants a high level of scalability that provides resilience to increased user traffic at unexpected times.

SEE: Hiring Kit: Cloud Engineer (TechRepublic Premium)

Secondly, for a business with a global scope of operations or such aspirations, the availability of services in different regions of the world becomes vital.

Thirdly and finally, business managers are focusing on automation when it comes to setting up IT infrastructure. The repeatability of processes makes things easier, and maintaining in-house infrastructure is no longer an issue. Tech-savvy companies then concentrate on designing and implementing new solutions. With the cloud, there is also more streamlined development of big data — provided, of course, that the company has such a department and expands its business based on the processing and analysis of data sets.

The coordination of internal work is also essential. For instance, thanks to the cloud, in the era of pandemic restrictions, it was possible to switch to remote working without major risks to transaction security. Offering employees the comfort of working from anywhere in the world is an opportunity to have a variety of highly focused specialists in their respective fields.

The challenges of cloud migration

The real challenge in migrating to the cloud is the training of teams to build a consistent awareness of the capabilities of the new environment. There has to be a strong focus on collaboration between architects, the engineering department for cloud environments and the security department with the development teams. This brings about a change in the organizational formula and an understanding that much better results will be achieved by implementing the site reliability engineering methodology.

Each new technology is thoroughly addressed by a panel of specialists in defined fields prior to implementation, which greatly simplifies the production process. Furthermore, security and cloud solutions specialists are present at implementations to share insights already at this stage. Breakdowns or problems are also solved in a broad group, which significantly reduces the number of repeated errors.

Cloud computing likewise allows IT professionals to define permissions in even finer detail, resulting in greater system-wide operational security and flexibility.

Automation and the cloud

The cloud offers an opportunity to create new network and server structures. The prospective operation of a business in a cloud environment is worth starting with an analysis of the possibilities of automating repetitive tasks.

In a team of experienced developers, administrators and IT security people, it is actually fairly easy to find a common language by using the infrastructure-as-code approach. Documenting each activity in the form of code allows the team to combine individual cloud elements into comprehensive structures.

An additional advantage of the solution appears to be the use of an advanced CI/CD process in code integration and deployment. The multi-step verification, testing and automatic deployment of code that builds the infrastructure create the ability to deliver repeatable development environments, simplifying the work of application developers.

What’s coming next?

By collaborating with integrators and directly with cloud providers, businesses will be able to follow the trends and best practices offered in the cloud computing market.

The ultimate challenge for teams is the transformation of the systems to fully integrate applications into the cloud environment. There is also work to be done on continuously increasing the level of availability of the services so that customers are kept informed about ongoing maintenance or breakdowns as rarely as possible.

Conotoxia is a fintech firm headquartered in Poland providing currency exchange, money transfers, online payments, multi-currency cards, multi-currency lending service and investment services.