When you think cloud computing you probably don’t think about the movie business, do you? But if you ask MTI Film CEO, Larry Chernoff, cloud is proving to be an industry asset amid the coronavirus pandemic. As film sets and production houses halt their operations, filmmakers and post-production companies are turning to cloud-based and various other remote production capabilities to help them continue working and successfully collaborate with their teams while quarantined at home. The importance of cloud migration is now being seen across industries.

As the world sings the praises of streaming, instant messaging and video conferencing tools like Zoom, Slack and Netflix, the real hero is cloud. While these popular applications have done a great job, it must be noted that none these online entertainment and collaboration apps would be able to connect and entertain us without public clouds and their accompanying technologies.

Making the move

Any business that has made the move from a traditional data infrastructure to the cloud will understand that it is a big decision. For some time South African enterprises have had reservations around bandwidth and data sovereignty but that all changed when some of the industries biggest players announced their plans to – and did – open data centres in the country.

There is no denying that cloud migration opens an organisation up to a range of benefits, However, it is crucial to determine if your organisation can extract actual value and tangible ROI from migrating to cloud because the advantages may be vast but the process requires a lot of hard work. Cloud migration is most certainly not a lift and shift situation.

So, how do you decide if your business should consider any of the many cloud solutions out there? By asking a few key questions.

1. Is your data centre nearing end-of-life or capacity thresholds?
2. If there is a sudden hardware failure, would it put your company and data at risk?
3. How quickly can you retrieve your data?
4. When was the last time you tested your backup?
5. Has the management of legacy IT become burdensome?
6. Are you tasked with meeting key business deliverables but you’re uncertain of your IT needs and requirements?
7. Are you struggling to keep up with information security and compliance demands?
8. Is your internal IT team battling to meet cost and availability goals
9. Do you need applications for mobile/distributed users?
10. Do you have offsite requirements, but lack the ability to manage and maintain another data centre?

If the answers to any of these questions left doubt in your mind about your organisation’s ability to handle downtime, to embrace digitalisation and make the most of new technologies, it may be time to consider a move to the cloud.

According to Gartner, any well thought-out cloud migration strategy should consider the five R’s. These include:

• Rehost: This entails redeploying an application to a different hardware environment. In doing so, you alter the app’s infrastructure configuration.
• Refactor: Deploying as-a-service (PaaS), developers can reuse the languages, containers and frameworks they have already invested in.
• Revise: This requires dual steps. The primary step involves the modification of existing code. The next step entails rehosting or refactoring of options to mobilise to the cloud. This allows the optimisation of cloud application to favour the cloud attributes of the provider’s infrastructure.
• Rebuild: Discard the existing code for an application to re-architecture the application. This ensures loss of the cognition and the feasibility to the unique attributes of the provider’s platform.
• Replace: Utilise commercial software and dispose of existing application. This means there is no need to invest in the mobilisation of a development team.

By finding the right cloud solutions to fit your unique business requirements, you can mitigate many of the chores weighing down your current workload and free up time to focus on other, more important, things. Need cloud migration advice? We’re here to help.