If you’re lucky enough to work for a growing business, then you likely know that the role of IT is also growing — and changing — quickly. Part of your job is to understand the evolving business needs and make the most of the available resources without busting your budgets. When a company is doing well, the temptation can be to immediately migrate to the latest shiny technology so that the business can be as “agile” and “cutting-edge” (or whatever the latest business buzzword is) as possible. But strategizing for your unique organizational needs is critical — as is clear and frequent communication with your leadership and individual business teams.
Your understanding of what technologies are available and how each can benefit your unique organization is key to helping your leadership team choose the best path forward. Take cloud migration, for example. Cloud technologies are the latest and greatest thing, and everyone’s embracing them, right? You could certainly just start throwing things up into the cloud to free up some of your on-premises resources and expand your overall infrastructure. However, the possibility of your IT costs skyrocketing overnight is pretty likely.
It makes sense to first strategize about how and what you’re going to move — and when. As you start moving applications and data to the cloud, are you sure you know how much it will cost? Are you sure you’re moving the right workloads to the cloud and keeping the right ones on premises? Are you sure you can monitor costs and performance to get the most out of cloud migration?
We’ve written a cautionary tale about moving to the cloud and paying for it without unpleasant surprises. The resulting e-book is based on an amalgamation of real-life lessons our customers have learned and suggests ways to avoid the biggest cloud-migration budget pitfalls:
- Figure out which cloud provider is the best fit in terms of cost, features, APIs and performance.
- Take a hard look at which workloads to migrate and which to leave on premises.
- Monitor all the resources your workloads are burning up, including compute, memory, network and storage.
In the end, you’ll discover a solution designed to provide everything you need to manage performance and costs, while right-sizing your cloud infrastructure. Model the relative performance and cost of migrating existing VMs to different clouds and running them on premises. Simplify your day-to-day operations by enabling IaaS monitoring and management across Azure and AWS. Get your hands around future costs before the unpleasant surprises roll in. Eliminate zombie VMs and right-size your virtual infrastructure.
The key to becoming more agile is finding the best approach for your unique organization and then optimizing, monitoring, managing and migrating everything from a single platform.
