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I truly believe in the azure environment. The possibilities are huge and growing every day. Do we all need to migrate to the cloud ‘sito-presto’… Yes, I think so. Why I’m so sure about this, is easy to explain. The most important reasons for me are: cost-efficient architecture possibilities and lower maintenance due to very stable architecture solutions. Both models PaaS (platform as a service) and IaaS (infrastructure as a service) make this possible for you.
Is a 100% cloud-based solution always the best solution for every situation? No, that would be too easy. You must always check your individual situation, requirements, evolutionary policy, risks, etc. But in the end, a big part of the solution will be situated in the cloud.
By just telling you what the best choice is or what the most proper implementation model is – at this point in time – for your organization isn’t helping you. You – or someone for you – probably have already figured that out already. Of course, it isn’t always that simple, but for what I believe, the most critical and difficult task is the way how to handle the transition period. Yes, we know our current situation with all their capabilities and concerns, and yes, we maybe also know where we want to land in the new cloud-based solution platform, but how do we make it happen? What are the risks? Can we do it in a single shot? Do we have a fallback scenario? Are there real-time processing conflicts? Can we do everything in Azure at this time? What about my current business users? Are they also impacted? And so on…
I can find thousands of questions to be answered before we make the first move. Is it necessary to know every single detail in advance? No, this is not what makes it happen. We’re living in the new very fast changing digital world. If we don’t dare to jump into it, we’re losing anyway. In the past, we needed to transform our whole entire platform in a minimum of time. A long period of designing, developing scripts, testing etc. leads not always to the required results. We can’t call it cost efficient either, the opposite …maybe? With platforms such as Azure, you can take other approaches. Microsoft made a risky but excellent choice building an open platform where you can combine everything together. Components of competitors, their own and even your own manufactured parts can be combined in the same platform your building.
O yes, you will have issues, and sometimes hard to handle. But it will not compromise the entire platform if you it the right way.
Like I said before, we need to jump into the cloud space, not tomorrow, but today. But we need to do this by making serious considerations and decisions, but most of all with the necessary care for our business. I’m a strong believer that hybrid solutions give you the opportunity to spread risks and costs. Connecting existing on-premise parts to the solution and adding new cloud-based parts to it let us optimally profit the best of both worlds.
Not only technical realizations are important, but also the human impact is high. People, (your technical staff) need to understand why this is needed. They also need time to investigate, learn and proving themselves of being capable maintaining and supporting the new infrastructure and platform. This requires a lot of time (leaving your comfort zone is harder than you think for most people).
A step by step approach, using a continuously changing hybrid solution is for me the most profitable way of doing the transition from on-premise to the cloud. We’re finally transforming to the cloud, when and how is our choice, but it will happen. Take it in your own hands and start today, building your first minor hybrid solution.
