Enterprise Cloud Strategy: What Are Your Cloud Storage Options

Ease of use, accessibility, security, and privacy all make cloud storage a popular choice for enterprise data storage. Let’s dive into the ins and outs of the cloud, including cloud strategy examples, cloud adoption strategy, and trends to know in 2022.

Benefits of Moving Your Enterprise to the Cloud

There are a lot of benefits of moving your enterprise to the cloud, but here are a few to get started:

• Having one storage space modernizes and streamlines your technological infrastructure.
• The cloud’s reliability and availability can lead to lower expenses and higher profitability/productivity.
• Cloud storage creates space for the massive data growth we continue to see and increases scalability for companies.

Why Do You Need a Cloud Adoption Strategy?

It’s not always easy to implement a new system—especially if you’re leading a large team, or if one system has been in place for years prior. Guiding your team through cloud adoption is easier with a strategy. Know the benefits, define your goals, and determine team roles, similar to how you would in scrum or agile frameworks.

Identify Key Benefits to Share Company-Wide

Your employees—most specifically in the IT department but company-wide as well—need to know what services you’ll be using and why, as well as how they’ll be expected to proceed. When you clearly communicate the usage and benefits, you’ll avoid a common phenomenon known as cloud sprawl, whereby different services are used disparately throughout teams and divisions. Cloud sprawl can cause unnecessary resource and funds allocation (not to mention security and compliance issues) which are easily avoidable with a firm and confident introduction.

Define Business Outcomes and Goals

Your company goals will factor directly into the enterprise cloud strategy. When addressing your team, ask yourself what the cloud will help you accomplish. What greater business or departmental objectives are you aiming for? Integrate cloud storage and its benefits into your overall objectives and key results. Get a project manager involved. When you adopt cloud storage, include strategic planning as well as disaster recovery plans specifically related to cloud data storage. This is an essential piece of the strategy. If you wait to create a plan, it may be too late in the event of a catastrophic data breach.

Determine Who Will Be in Charge of What Cloud Service

Communication and delegation are two integral parts of successful data migration to the cloud. To ensure continuity within the company’s data streams, define team roles and set expectations early.

Develop Concrete Roadmap for Safe, Secure Cloud Migration

What’s worse than lost data? For enterprise companies, there isn’t much that rivals it. Part of creating a cloud migration strategy involves creating a roadmap to lay out how and when data will be migrated, as well as how it will be safeguarded. Lost or breached data during a transfer can be catastrophic, so ensuring a secure transition is vital.

What Are the Different Types of Enterprise Cloud Strategy?

Not all cloud strategies and deployment models are created equal. Here are various scenarios that organizations should consider.

Private and Public

When you hear people talk about private cloud storage, they’re referring to hardware and software only used by the company. Private solutions are usually utilized by government agencies, financial institutions, and other similar mid-to-large companies.

Public storage is a shared space in which multiple tenants store data using the same hardware, storage, and other network devices. This form is usually used for web-based email, testing and development environments, etc. Some companies have both public and private storage.

Hybrid

If you have both storage types, you may turn to a hybrid model. Hybrid models lend themselves to more data and applications to play with between environments. They’re also more cost effective than just using internal storage, which makes it an attractive solution for medium businesses and enterprises. During the migration process, all businesses are technically hybrids.

Multicloud

It’s common to conflate multicloud with a hybrid. They have their similarities, but they’ll take teams down two separate pathways. Multicloud refers to the use of multiple cloud providers, whether public, private, or onsite. Many businesses have migrated to a multicloud approach, as it avoids vendor lock-in and allows teams to take full advantage of the leading software solutions and technological advances. In many ways, multicloud storage is the wave of the future. There are simply more streamlined solutions for multicloud that other strategies don’t have access to.

How to Build an Enterprise Cloud Strategy

After you’ve identified which cloud strategy you want to use, it’s time to set it up.

Identify Business Goals
First, you need to identify your business goals and objectives, and make sure to clearly define how your cloud migration will help achieve them. It’s also vital to create a list of goals for the migration process itself. And remember, you may need to adjust those goals as the process continues to progress.

At a minimum, identify the business drivers and the priorities of a migration. The business will benefit most from explicit and quantifiable key performance indicators, or expectations.

Prioritize Goals
When it comes to making a roadmap, teams often opt to migrate the services with the fewest dependencies, such as internal-facing services. Then, they’ll follow up with the external services closest to their customers.

Some organizations may choose to start with customer-facing services first in order to test potential impact and mitigate the impact in larger migrations. Choosing outermost services has more risk involved, but your sample will be more representative.

Assess the State of Your IT Team
Is your IT team ready for your data migration? What training and support will they need? Are they equipped with the brainpower and time to take on the scale of the project? These questions all need to be considered when creating your cloud strategy. You’re not going to be able to implement a successful strategy without the steady-handed support of your IT team.

Choose the Right Cloud Deployment Model
Choosing the right cloud deployment is dependent on budget, organization size, business goals, team capabilities, and available resources. Ultimately, the outside appearance to customers will remain the same. Enterprises today should also look at industry longevity for the deployment model, as cloud adoption is becoming more and more common.

Partner With the Right Cloud Service
With the right model, your cloud migration can be a smooth, secure, headache-free process. Seagate Lyve Cloud allows enterprise organizations to overcome the cost and complexity of storing, moving, and activating data at scale. With Lyve Cloud, you can capture massive amounts of unstructured data, overcome data gravity pitfalls, take control of your own data, enhance your hybrid multicloud performance, and move your data wherever you need it with no egress or access fees. Seagate Lyve Cloud is an all-in-one resource that can make cloud migration easier, less stressful, and more cost effective.

Prioritize Cloud Initiatives
Migration—especially of large amounts of data to different environments—takes time. The entire process, from training and assigning roles to actual migration and setting up cloud-native applications/services, can take anywhere from two months to two years depending on the size of the project.

In fact, migrating to the cloud is shown to take longer than expected across industries. Add in a project buffer.

To ease the timeline, determine which departments and data will be migrated first, and sequence your progress from there. Implementing a roadmap in your project management tool may help get your team on the same page and set expectations. It’s also important to note that this process will likely require you to restructure your IT team and its responsibilities/roles. The degree to which the IT org chart changes will depend on what proportion of the department’s workload is shifting to the cloud.

As an example, your enterprise may have more sensitive data that you’d like to keep on premises, or in-house. You’ll then allocate team resources to both on-premises management, as well as cloud migration management.

Cloud migration on an enterprise level isn’t an everyday IT task, so it can be challenging to use existing personnel to carry it out. Research shows that over 80% of cloud leaders report not achieving success simply due to a lack of internal knowledge and skills. Because of the unique skill sets required to implement a successful migration, many enterprise organizations choose to outsource their cloud migration team.

If you do set up an in-house cloud migration team, you’ll likely need people to fill the roles of cloud architect, cloud engineer, systems administrator, security manager, compliance specialist, and executive sponsor.

Assess Risk and Find Solutions
Contingency plans are a must when it comes to data migration. There is always risk when moving data, so it’s important to have disaster recovery plans in place should anything go wrong. When it comes to your company's data, the potential costs, and associated risks, there should be no room for unexpected outcomes.

Implement Roadmap
Once you’ve set your goals and expectations, briefed your team and selected roles/responsibilities, found a suitable cloud service provider, and assessed and planned for risk mitigation, you’re ready to begin implementation.

Communicate Implementation Along the Way
Remember to use a holistic approach and involve your entire organization, as well as provide as much training and support to your IT team as possible. Communication is the name of the game. Keep your team integrated in a larger communication thread, whether in a project management tool or in weekly standups.

Enterprise Cloud Strategy Trends to Know in 2022

1. Look out for holistic cloud migration. Cloud migration is pivoting from an IT practice to a team-wide strategy. The new focus is on a holistic, enterprise-wide approach that involves everyone in the organization.
2. Applications are modernizing. Old applications don’t always play well in new environments. That can often be the case when migrating applications into the cloud. Application modernization updates legacy apps to fit their new environment and, in doing so, protects costly investments from going down the drain.
3. Cloud vertices. Industry cloud providers are taking center stage, giving businesses the customizable approach they need to be successful. Vertical-specific providers limit the dangers of the lift-and-shift migration approach, which can be detrimental to niche applications such as hospitality, media and entertainment, and healthcare.
4. Greater reliance on cloud-native applications (such as Seagate Lyve Cloud). We’re seeing a shift to cloud-native apps that are built specifically for their environment, making them easier to develop, deploy, and update.

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