To the Cloud, and Step on It
Whether that means migrating all their data to a cloud-based data warehouse, reconfiguring and updating their IT infrastructure, or accelerating the delivery of their services and experiences to customers by moving apps to the cloud, becoming cloud-native enhances an organization’s competitive edge and business value.
The process of adopting cloud computing and integrating it into your organization’s solutions and service delivery, however, is no small undertaking. As a data-intensive activity, cloud adoption takes a certain level of skill and precision, as well as clear vision and a dedicated investment in terms of capital, talent, and, most importantly, time.
Because things are moving so quickly, you don’t want your organization to be left in the wake of the competition as they advance with their cloud adoption efforts. To this end, one of the tools in your enterprise’s belt should be a cloud accelerator or an acceleration program.
How Does Cloud Acceleration Work?
Fundamentally, cloud accelerators are like any other kind of accelerator whose main function is enhancing the performance of technology. They streamline cloud adoption and improve the speed of operation of applications for users and developers alike.
Cloud accelerators have a range of forms, including abstraction layers that lie ahead of your cloud stack, cloud managed services platforms providing accelerated delivery, and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) environments that quicken cloud migrations while improving accessibility and reliability across workloads.
Usually, cloud acceleration is provided as a service by organizations specializing in cloud managed services, whose networks are architected deliberately to support high-speed data transfer and routing. Acceleration is actualized by optimizing and augmenting a web-based delivery network, improving performance, and reducing latency.
What to Consider Before Accelerating
Before your enterprise dives into investing in cloud acceleration, your leadership should take a step back and examine where the business is on its cloud journey, as well as what its highest cloud priorities are and how best to execute them.
For instance, is your organization just starting to migrate to the cloud and therefore in need of a migration acceleration program? Or is the enterprise already comfortably in the cloud and looking to improve user experience by accelerating service delivery?
Another point you may want to consider is whether your team is sufficiently skilled to strategize and execute cloud accelerations on their own, or if your business requires external assistance to bridge skill gaps and complete the project.
A Deep Dive into Cloud Acceleration
Investing in migration acceleration will streamline your customers’ journey by implementing an application-centric process focused on the right workloads for a low-risk on-premises-to-cloud migration. Several avenues are available to accomplish this, including the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Application Migration Program (MAP) for Windows.
This helps accelerate your organization’s migration to the cloud via a thorough methodology and a robust set of automation and acceleration tools. It also prepares your talent to tackle the operation by providing consulting support, training, and services credits. As a result, AWS MAP can reduce both the risk and cost of migration by building a strong operational foundation for your enterprise’s team.
Another powerful AWS migration accelerator is AWS Athena Federated Query (AFQ), upon which Trianz has built extensions that can provide many advantages – such as faster time to market, a low-cost proof of concept, and a quick scale to production, all with fewer lines of code.
Furthermore, Trianz has built its own solution, EVOVE (powered by CompilerWorks), to accelerate the process through automation of at least 60% of the migration effort. EVOVE first provides your organization with the objective and scope of your migration, as well as end-to-end program management and support, before automatically modernizing approximately 90% of your business’s data (and then converting the remainder manually). Finally, it quickly identifies and resolves any migration-related issues in the database before bringing the modern architecture online
If, on the other hand, your enterprise already has an established cloud presence which it is looking to update and streamline to augment customer experience, you probably want to consider a different type of cloud accelerator. Since the digital landscape has grown to encompass multi- and hybrid-cloud networks, data can take longer to transport and access. Naturally, this latency can obstruct cloud workloads and performance.
Cloud-based experience accelerators can address these issues in several ways, depending on your organization’s needs. If you are looking to update your customers’ experience and satisfaction with your business’s websites or eCommerce applications, your organization may want to look at acceleration tools that take the form of abstraction layers and HTTP caches that are housed in large servers such as NGINX. Solutions like this one perform short-lived caching, in-memory, of the most frequently used assets, delivering results to your end-users almost at once.
Alternatively, a cloud-based application accelerator can manifest as an optimization engine that filters through the more than 760,000 networks making up the internet and selects the fastest one in real time. Such platforms will significantly increase cloud application performance by minimizing even the slightest delays in page loads or processes.
The Transformational Effects
Wherever your enterprise is along the path to the cloud, accelerators undoubtedly bring numerous transformative effects, such as quicker time to market, faster and more accurate data and insights, improved customer and end user experience, and reduced cost overall. Investing in a cloud acceleration program is undoubtedly the way to bring your enterprise’s data, applications, websites, and services to life more quickly and maximize its potential to generate and deliver business value.
Our experts have helped hundreds of enterprises move to the cloud – starting with robust planning and road mapping and ending with successful cloud deployment and ongoing support. Reach out to get in touch or learn more.
