By Gaurav Mohan, VP, SAARC & Middle East, NETSCOUT
In today’s modern business world, cloud computing services are indispensable. Organizations across industries are deploying and improving their cloud strategies to speed up their digital transformation initiatives, leveraging the benefits brought forth by these technologies.
Shifting applications to the cloud has become an increasingly important long-term strategy for businesses looking to improve IT efficiencies while reducing CapEx and OpEx costs.
Globally, the cloud migration services market is expected to reach $515.83 billion by 2027. The majority of Middle Eastern enterprises have either already implemented cloud solutions or have plans to do so in the near future, as reported in recent research by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA). According to the study, 42% of Middle Eastern enterprises have already adopted cloud solutions, while 85% are either considering or actively adopting cloud technology.
Migrating to the cloud is often described as a journey because it is rarely simple, linear, clear, or complete. Business requirements can alter at any time, and an organization’s migration plans may vary along the road. Unfortunately, outages and disturbances are an immutable principle of network design. They are a by-product of our internet-connected environment. The key to owning your cloud migration is to be proactive in detecting problems and having procedures in place to swiftly regain control.
Cloud migration has traditionally consisted of three phases: Premigration, migration and postmigration. It began with business and IT leaders deciding which cloud service or services to use, followed by the migration from an on-premises data center or colocation facility and modifying existing workloads to suit the cloud. However, this is no longer the situation. In addition to making the initial transition to the cloud, businesses may expand into multi-cloud or hybrid cloud architectures or even transfer some workloads back on-premises.
With the expansion of network architectures, each new device, branch office, or application adds to the cloud’s complexity. Depending on their requirements, businesses can choose from models such as software as a service (SaaS) for cloud-hosted applications, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) for cloud-based data storage, servers, and networking, and platform as a service (PaaS) for an integrated cloud-based infrastructure. Unfortunately, these models share similar blind spot vulnerabilities. When disruptions occur, databases, files, and applications may become inaccessible, preventing the operation of mission-critical services.
Regardless of the organization’s current migration project, each project introduces a new level of complexity that IT must manage. This is particularly true because cloud-migrated business services are vulnerable to numerous performance-impacting events. This intricacy makes the cloud-delivered business-critical services susceptible to multiple performance-impacting events. For instance, an enterprise IT team may have an online storefront with customer-facing microservices hosted on a public cloud, while the back-end systems that contain sensitive customer data may be located on-premises. Additionally, each SaaS vendor has its own configurations, hosting, and network architectures.
Degraded performance is a common consequence of cloud migration. It is also an excellent indicator of underlying issues. Keeping track of all network transactions can assist in analyzing and optimizing the delivery of applications and services. Cloud providers predominantly provide the service. Ultimately, backup and recovery are the companies’ responsibility. When migrating applications to the cloud, companies must completely anticipate the potential consequences of service interruptions and have a plan in place to mitigate problems that reach customers and users.
While embarking on the journey of cloud migration, businesses must realize that they can’t control what they can’t see. End-to-end visibility capabilities must be built into the cloud migration strategy to reduce the risk of performance, availability, and cybersecurity issues before, during, and after cloud migration.
Moreover, security must be built in from the beginning so that organizations are prepared for the now much wider threat landscape. All of the good organizations have done for their traditional on-premises cyber security must be replicated in the cloud to reduce risk using a consistent data set that can be shared across SecOps, DevOps, and NetOps teams.
Finally, enterprises must realize that raw packets serve as the anchor of context across all types of data sources, allowing for effective and efficient problem-solving. Ensuring optimal application performance and rapid problem resolution by leveraging scalable deep packet inspection technology is critical to resolving the most complex problems organizations face when migrating to public, private, and hybrid cloud, regardless of whether companies use lift-and-shift, refactoring, or both as part of their migration strategy.
In a highly demanding digital world where slow is the new off, delivering uninterrupted, secure and high-performance services that delight end-users before, during, and after migration of workloads to the cloud is often the difference between success and failure. As a result, in order to reap the benefits of the cloud, enterprises must overcome the challenges associated with cloud migration.
