74% of mid-market enterprises keen to moving applications on cloud : 5 key takeaways from SAP - IDC report

The latest IDC InfoBrief commissioned by SAP India suggests that 82% of midmarket enterprises are focusing on cloud migration. 

“The Indian midmarket segment is poised to play a significant role in the country’s quest to become a $5tn economy. SAP is committed to co-create, empower and enable mid-market enterprises in their digital-first business and growth journey,” said Kulmeet Bawa, President, and Managing Director, SAP Indian Subcontinent.

Cloud migration - Cloud.in

• 83% of enterprises are focusing on resiliency objectives like Business Continuity as they want to ensure operations are unaffected due to disruptions in the future.
• 75% expect their operations to return to pre-pandemic levels by end of 2021
• 74% intend to increase or retain their spend on IT Security, Governance & Risk Management in 2022
• 74% of enterprises would move more applications to cloud
• 46% of enterprises will adopt a Hybrid Cloud Strategy

This study evaluated over 350 Indian midmarket enterprises.

References: 

• https://www.sap.com/india/documents/2021/12/dcef61e6-087e-0010-bca6-c68f7e60039b.html
• https://news.sap.com/india/2021/12/moving-applications-to-cloud/

Best Practices for cloud migration

 

In an age of choice and flexibility, multi-cloud is the norm today rather than the exception. Most enterprises today want to avoid vendor lock in, and want to choose different cloud platforms for different workloads. A study conducted by IDC of 300 enterprise IT leaders revealed that 93.2% of respondents were using ‘multiple infrastructure clouds’ for their business operations.

While having greater choice is a clear necessity, it also throws up multiple challenges for organizations. Any organization that underestimates the complexity of multi-cloud migration will fail to realize the full potential of a multi-cloud strategy. Being aware of the potential hurdles can help enterprises to tap into the numerous business benefits of a multi-cloud environment. Hence, before planning any cloud migration, it is critical to clearly define the pre-migration and post-migration stage, and document the existing IT ecosystem consisting of apps, databases, networks and interdependencies.

We recommend some of the following best practices for ensuring seamless multi-cloud migration

Define what to migrate

 

Before you decide to migrate applications or data to a cloud platform from on-premise or from another cloud, it is critical to first identify a list of applications that must be migrated. This can be done on the basis of performance gain, economics of maintaining the application or security, after migration to the new cloud environment. Enterprises hence must invest enough time to maintain an inventory of applications so that there is minimum risk of any missing dependency during a migration process.

Decide the type of migration

Once the inventory of applications is prepared, enterprises must decide the type of cloud environment they want to migrate – will be it be an all public cloud environment, will be it a private cloud or will be it a hybrid cloud environment? Depending on the benefits, you could decide to migrate to the cloud environment that your organization need. The migration must be planned in such a way that it is less disruptive with very less downtime.

Prepare and test

The new cloud environment where your applications and data will migrate needs to be ready to receive data in a format that is required by the cloud provider. You could start small, and move migrating applications gradually, as you gain greater confidence in the new cloud environment. It is also equally important to test if your on-premise applications with their data and dependencies will work properly in the new environment. Factors such as latency, performance and additional bandwidth also need to be considered as migration to the cloud can affect end users.

Monitor and measure 

Post migration, organizations must implement tools that can help them get complete visibility into the performance of every application. This can be done by correlating the performance of every application by mapping the user journeys across different platforms such as web or mobile. Post migration, organizations must check if all the application interdependencies and linkages are working perfectly, and also check if performance levels have improved or reduced, due to migration. You could also use cloud-native monitoring tools that provide application-level insights and monitoring on the cloud environment.

Enforce security

Most of the breaches that have occurred on public cloud platforms are due to user mis-configurations. Other issues include unencrypted databases, weak network controls and poor governance. Hence, post migration, enterprises must ensure that all applications must ideally have the same level of security across on-premise apps or apps in the cloud environment.

Lastly, if your organization lacks the capability or has less bandwidth to carry out cloud migration activities, you could consider outsourcing this activity to a specialist and certified cloud service provider. For ensuring that you get the best out of your cloud migration, you must consider service providers that can not only guide your organization in choosing the best possible cloud platform, but also help your organization ensure effortless provisioning, monitoring and management via a single dashboard.

Check out how Cloud Migration benefits you and your business

Cloud is an online data centre where we can store our data safely instead of storing it on a local hardware device which has a greater risk of data loss. Cloud migration refers to shifting of all your database and application from an on-premises server to online cloud storage. Migration helps you secure all your data by transporting them to the cloud, creating online backups and limiting the access to your data. 

Key Advantages
People migrating to the cloud want to use the cloud services that are best suited according to their needs so that the migration goes as smoothly as possible. The usage of cloud computing is on growth as people are using cloud services to grow their businesses. AWS cloud is a company which provides advanced cloud services. These key advantages will tell you about the best benefits of the cloud so that you can ensure to get the most out of your cloud service.

• Faster Deployment Times
Once you migrate to the cloud, you would be able to deploy your applications and services faster, cloud helps you quickly provision servers which tends to be a much simpler process when compared to other alternatives. Migration helps you in discovering the most suitable operating system and placing it into a network or data centre.

• Advanced Security Systems
Increased security is provided by cloud services to save your data from any theft or damage, limiting the access to certain people according to your permission. Cloud migration results in securing all your applications and database and the advanced systems help you with backups and damage control to secure your data from any disaster.

• Simple Infrastructure
Cloud provides you with simple infrastructure which allows you to provide services through a very easy procedure, removing all the complexities which were part of the process earlier. Cloud helps you in providing access to the data to your remotest resource centre and put the collaborative effort in any operation and efficiently finish your work.

• 24/7 Activity Monitoring
AWS Cloud offers you continuous monitoring of any activity on your network and database, to save your data from any kind of unauthorized access. Your activity monitor also lets you know all your sales and profit to keep track of all your transaction, cash inflow and outflow. It helps you monitor the activity of all your employees to keep aware of the status of your operations and development.

• Backup and Data Loss
Cloud provides you with an automatic backup of your data to ensure that you don’t lose any data while any kind of transfer. It helps you in disaster recovery so that you can figure out the damage caused by the disaster and its reason, and set up things back again to work.

• Cost Cutting
Cost-cutting is the most prominent feature of cloud, which can result in a huge profit for any business, they also provide auto-scaling, which allows in the provision of services and turn it off when not required. It helps you prevent any unnecessary expense required during increased workload in an on-premises server.

• Reduced Data Centre
With the cloud, you won’t be needing multiple data centre setups as all your data is secured in an online database with the highest security. Multiple data centres affect the collaboration as it becomes complicated and it costs a great amount in running these data centres efficiently all along the same time. Therefore, the cloud decreases the complexity of collaboration of farthest data centres and working together and also helps in cutting the cost of running these data centres.

• Improve Operational Efficiency
Cloud makes it easier for your businesses to modernise and connect to your existing applications and services. The interconnection of business application helps you improve your employee’s efficiency and provide adequate information about previous operations make further operations easy and relatable. You can easily access the updated versions of these operations without going through any complex configuration.

Final thoughts of Conclusion
Cloud migration has several numbers of benefits which can help any new start-up or a developed business to grow into a mega enterprise. The services offered by the cloud are very convincing and promising, fulfilling all the needs of future IT advancements. Cloud computing comes with never-ending benefits, and websites that offer managed cloud services such as Clouddotin provide you with end-to-end project management.