Many businesses are now adopting cloud services for storage facilities and to streamline their workflow. With the advancing technology changes and innovation, cloud services help businesses in diverse ways, including ease of scalability and flexibility in planning, organizing, and implementing work processes. For this reason, we highlight all the concepts of cloud-first strategy, how to implement it, best practices, and possible challenges, among other insights.

What is a cloud-first strategy? Quick Overview

Cloud first strategy revolves around adopting cloud technologies for all new infrastructure, platforms, and applications. It is all about prioritizing cloud computing services and not legacy IT systems.

The cloud-first strategy streamlines the workflows, allowing remote working by leveraging its tools and services to create a smooth working environment. This enables all team members to access storage facilities, tools, and data from any location.

With the cloud-first strategy taking over the business world, many organizations are already shifting and implementing a cloud-first approach in their working environments to keep up with the ever-evolving business landscape. This enhances the security, scalability, and agility of their business dealings.

Reasons to adopt a cloud-first strategy

As a business who aspires to scale your business to the next level, below are some of the reasons why this is a perfect idea.

• You will get cost-effective and professional platforms and software solutions.
• You will enjoy rapid improvements and repairs more often
• The maintenance requirements are minimal in cloud-first strategies compared to other infrastructure strategies.
• It is easy to build the system in sections when needed
• It is easy to upgrade and adjust the cloud services when needed (ease of scalability) in cloud-first solution approaches.

Benefits of Cloud-first strategy

So, what value do originations that adopt a cloud-first strategy get? The benefits of the cloud-first approach include the following:

• Ease of scaling

Ease of scalability is the number one benefit of adopting a cloud-first strategy. Here, organizations only spend in relation to what they’ve used. In fact, the auto scaling feature in cloud approaches allows businesses to adjust the resources as needed. Increasing based on the demand and reducing based on the performance without affecting the overall performance of the system.

• Allows room for innovations

With a cloud-first strategy, businesses can easily try and implement new ideas and concepts. This allows rapid business expansion, be it day-to-day activities, be it the general business model or the products and services they are offering.

For instance, a business can transition from one model, let’s say the waterfall model, to another, let’s say agile seamlessly. This, in turn, increases deployment speed and enhances overall user experience.

• Better visibility

Better visibility gives you a clear overview of your app’s performance through a single dashboard. This makes it easy to evaluate the insights provided to make viable decisions that will benefit the business at large. This was a complex process when cloud services didn’t exist. Besides, better visibility creates room to review any issues and rectify them early enough before extreme damages happen.

• Cost-effective

Generally, a cloud-first strategy is a cost-effective solution for businesses. There are no costs like rental or physical storage space costs, repairs & maintenance costs, costs of cooling servers, and server & related hardware expenses in the cloud as in the case of on-site servers. With such costs in mind, it makes more sense to adopt cloud infrastructure.

• Highly reliable

Organizations don’t have to worry about hardware maintenance with cloud infrastructure. In fact, hardware failures create an unproductive working environment, and this means having professionals around to monitor the overall performance. In cloud infrastructure, all the processes are streamlined, and the concerns about regular maintenance are out of the picture, making it highly reliable.

• Enhanced Security

Customer and infrastructure data are vital in any organization, hence the need for solid security measures. Cloud services offer solid security measures that protect valuable system data. What’s more, the cloud security features ensure the business aligns with industry-set rules and regulations, thus safeguarding the business from all angles.

• Ensuring business continuity

Uncertainties happen, and disasters can strike at any time, which can impact the continuation of business in different ways.

Cloud infrastructure offers solid disaster recovery procedures that ensure the stability of the business, even when some unexpected events happen. With cloud apps and data sets across different locations, it becomes easy for businesses to recover from any disasters.

• Business agility

Cloud infrastructure accommodates change in different aspects. With the ever-changing business landscape and digital transformation practices, business agility is the only solution. It allows any business to grow and expand as it aligns with the changes. These changes could be market shifts, emerging opportunities, or unexpected challenges. It is easy to allocate resources accordingly in cloud infrastructure, a solution that enables a business to withstand any competition while remaining solid.

• Collaboration

Cloud infrastructure has collaborative tools that facilitate a seamless working environment, including remote operations. Cloud infrastructure offers data, storage facilities, and tools access that facilitate seamless collaboration.

Cloud-first strategy challenges

Although cloud-first is a solid and reliable strategy, it may not suit all the organization’s operations requirements. There are some challenges making the strategy unreliable for specific organization dealings and requirements, making some businesses opt for other options like hybrid or on-premises approaches.

Here are some cloud-first strategy challenges you should know about:

• Probability for over-Provisioning

Over-provisioning of cloud resources is a common challenge in cloud-first strategy, especially with poor monitoring and management practices. Organizations should strategize on how to optimize resource utilization and overall cost control to limit unnecessary expenses.

• Data transfer costs

Data transfer costs in the cloud approach may be extreme, especially when handling huge data volumes, whether uploading or downloading from the cloud. This can lead to overspending, especially when you have a limited budget. The good part is the fact that you can easily save the data on the hard drive to manual uploading, thus saving on costs.

• Connectivity & Network Dependence

The cloud-first approach relies mostly on internet connectivity for it to complete its procedures and processes. Under network interruption challenges, access to cloud services is cut short, thus impacting overall performance and leading to downtime.

• Security concerns

General data security in the cloud is a major concern. In fact, many businesses depend on legacy security protocols set pre-web times or pre-cloud, which can be hard to implement in the cloud or become complex in different ways.

For this reason, it is essential for business owners to follow specific measures that streamline a cloud-first approach. These measures follow DevOps to enhance security and streamline operations within an organization.

Some other practices you can implement to facilitate better security in a cloud-first strategy include the following:

• Always share the organization’s protocols across all departments and teams. These protocols play a big role in enhancing the security and work processes in an organization.
• Limit employees from most privileges, especially when it comes to data access. Only give employee data access when relevant. This tip will limit data leaks as a result of human error, thus enhancing the overall security of cloud infrastructure.
• Implement a security integration into the system’s life cycle. During integration and deployment processes, make sure you follow best practices such as code scanning and vulnerability checks as you establish appropriate remedies. Don’t forget to include runtime management automatically, especially during integrations.
• Put in place runtime protection using tools such as WEF – web application firewalls and NGFW – next-generation firewalls to track traffic requests and compare the system’s operations under different scenarios.

How to implement a Cloud-First Strategy Approach successfully

At this point, you have all the reasons to adopt a cloud-first strategy. You also understand the challenges and possible solutions that come with this approach. However, how do you establish a cloud-first strategy successfully? Below are the measures and practices that will streamline the process of adopting a cloud-first strategy effortlessly:

• Do research

Before you consider implementing a cloud-first approach, take time and study from others. Search for organizations that have already implemented a cloud-first strategy and learn how they’ve mastered the art, including how they carry out their processes. Don’t forget to ask as many questions as you can. This will help you establish a long-term solution that will help you achieve your goals faster.

• Build a cloud-first culture

After you’ve done enough research and realized that a cloud-first approach will benefit your company big time, you then start building a cloud-first culture within your organization. This process should take place from the top to management levels. Everyone in the company needs to be on the same page with the organization’s dealings and planning. So, start advocating for a culture shift to facilitate cloud-first approach adoption as you stress transparency.

The process is continuous. It revolves around continuous learning & improvements, enhanced collaborations, and the introduction of self-service & automation tools to speed and streamline work processes.

• Regular training and development of skills

Continuous training and development of skills is an integral part of cloud-first strategy. Here, you need to determine if there is a need for extra outsourced experts with specific skills after evaluating the current team’s potential.

Of course, some skills are crucial for cloud-first approach implementation. Engineering, cybersecurity, cloud architecture, and DevOps practices are some of the crucial skills that facilitate cloud-first approach implementation.

You can welcome targeted training programs to help your team understand and master cloud technologies and procedures.

• Create a continuous collaboration and innovation environment

With cloud tools and resources, there will always be a collaborative working environment for streamlined communication and work procedures across all the teams.

Innovative solutions facilitate streamlined workflows and employee satisfaction, which is a key aspect of any business. These cloud technologies enhance flexibility, especially when performing experiments is relevant.

Above all, the right tools and an environment open to creativity accelerate cloud-first adoption in any organization.

• Self-service & automation

Automation tools create a seamless and streamlined work environment in a cloud-first strategy by eliminating manual tasks, which can be strenuous, prone to errors, and time-consuming.

By self-service in a cloud-first approach, users can handle all their IT resource requirements by themselves, thus creating an effective environment where issues can be resolved faster.

The self-service and automation tools help businesses reduce most work on IT staff, create a smooth working environment, and enhance the overall efficiency within an organization.

Improved resource management and faster response times are some of the measures that enhance cloud-first strategy success.

• Create a Cloud-First Migration Roadmap

With all the other steps in place, you can now create a clear roadmap that aligns with your organization’s unique needs and start the cloud migration process.

Things to consider before adopting a cloud-first strategy

With the many advantages cloud infrastructure offers, it is common for many businesses to rush the process of implementing cloud infrastructure without proper planning and looking into some aspects.

In fact, many businesses face extreme pressure while looking forward to enjoying the cloud-first benefits, hence opting for cloud computing instead of self-hosted infrastructure. One thing about the cloud-first approach is that the process can still function in colonial or on-premises infrastructure since all processes don’t have to run in the cloud.

Yes, an organization can adopt a cloud-first strategy, but fail to enjoy the many benefits because of several reasons. Therefore, it is essential to consider the following factors before adopting a cloud-first strategy to enhance its success:

• Vendor selection

There are many cloud architectures and services, with each having distinct features, benefits, and challenges. Choosing the wrong option may result in overspending of the services and failing to leverage the selected vendor fully, thus poor performance.

Therefore, do research, review the options available, and choose the one that aligns with your business dealings. If possible, ask experts from Aalpha Information Systems for expert advice.

• Budget

It can be hard to determine the exact cloud-first approach budget. This is due to the complexity of the pricing model, making it hard to determine the viability of implementing a specific model.

• Skills

You will need specialized expertise to complete cloud processes and procedures. If your IT staff doesn’t have enough or the required skills and experience in cloud-first solutions, don’t overlook the need to upskill the required talents.

• Performance

Depending on the workload, you may need to reconsider on-premises architecture to stabilize security regulations and the use of available resources.

Cloud-first strategy best practices

As you look forward to implementing a cloud-first strategy, the following best practices will help elevate your business, ensuring that the cloud-first strategy is really working in your favor:

• Know the cloud business vision and objectives

The cloud infrastructure comes with many benefits, depending on business dealings. For instance, streamlined IT processes, enhanced user engagement, better app performance, better agility, and reduced costs, among many other benefits.

This does not guarantee that you’ll achieve all these benefits on the go when you adopt a cloud-first strategy. You can only define the vision and objectives of your business to help you prioritize your unique business needs.

• Determine the services ideal for cloud services

Not all services are perfect with a cloud-first approach. In fact, some tasks have sensitive data that cloud infrastructure cannot accommodate because of compliance reasons. Some other tasks work best on-premises for easy optimization to meet local user needs,

Therefore, as you strategize on implementing a cloud-first approach, define all the workloads that suit the cloud to facilitate a seamless cloud migration and to save on time and other resources.

• Select the appropriate cloud architecture

We have different ways to set up a cloud architecture, with each style having unique features, benefits, and limitations. For instance, you can opt for multiple public clouds, a single public cloud, or a hybrid architecture.

Therefore, do research and settle on an architecture that meets your business vision and objectives for the cloud-first approach. Multi-cloud, for instance, can be complex in terms of operations but comes with a lot of flexibility.

• Embrace the upskilling of your staff

You can have a solid IT staff but lack adequate knowledge, skills, and experience in cloud service providers and how to go about all the procedures. If your staff have some skills and experience in cloud computing processes, always create an environment that motivates them to learn and acquire more skills and expertise in the field. This will elevate the value that a cloud-first approach brings to your organization.

You can achieve this by motivating your staff to pursue and acquire cloud computing certifications. You can go a notch higher and establish in-house training forums to upskill your IT staff on matters of cloud infrastructure.

• Track usage and spending regularly

Spending beyond limits can harm a company in many ways. As you plan to implement a cloud-first strategy, make sure to keep tracking resource usage and overall spending. Check as you evaluate the costs more often in relation to the workloads. With the insights you get, you can then compare the spending vs costs when on-premises infrastructure. Most importantly, review operational and maintenance costs.

This practice will help you identify areas that are cost-intensive so that you can determine appropriate measures to optimize spending and save costs. You can go for discount options such as usage discounts, reserved instances, & Spot VMs and use right-sizing & auto scaling processes for cost optimization strategies.

• Repatriate where necessary

Yes, you can optimize the cloud services to streamline your workloads. However, there ae instances when you will realize that cloud services aren’t perfect for specific workloads due to poor performance or overspending on them. In such instances, do a cloud repatriation. The process is all about moving the workload back to on-premises. This means you’ll need to have a cloud exit plan well in place to point out workloads that require the shift when necessary to save on costs and enhance the stability of the system’s performance.

Conclusion

With the many businesses embracing digital transformation through approaches like cloud-first strategies, your business isn’t exceptional. You can take advantage of the advanced technology and embrace ultimate flexibility, scalability, better security, and business agility, among other top benefits of a cloud-first strategy. Don’t forget to put in place cloud-first best practices as described in this guide to get the most out of the solution.

Any queries? Get in touch with our Cloud Application Development Company : Aalpha Information Systems!