Why You Shouldn’t Skip Cloud Foundation in Your Cloud Journey

As the year kicked off, you may have thought that it’s finally time to start moving workloads (or more workloads) to Azure or AWS. But, you are wondering, will I need some help warding off those predictable mistakes that can cost time and money down the road?

The truth is that if you skip building a solid Cloud Foundation in your cloud journey, those mistakes may eventually nab you — and the results could be more annoying than you think.

Lightstream Cloud Foundation is the first step towards true digital transformation because it doesn’t just look at technology but also at the people, data and processes that must be brought together to create value for the business. For a successful cloud deployment to occur, organizations must consider how the technology is implemented, supported, optimized and updated on an ongoing basis.

Luckily, Lightstream, a Microsoft Gold Cloud Platform Partner and an AWS Security Competency Partner, can successfully perform your Cloud Foundation workshop — and provide the blue print for cloud adoption that you’ll need to succeed.

Here are some examples of issues that Cloud Foundation addresses:

Which workloads make sense for cloud?

Cloud Foundation can help you determine if cloud is the best option for a specific workload or application. This depends on the application itself, the nature of the workload, the data, and industry regulations or business requirements.

Taking a systematic approach to your organization’s workloads, applications, and requirements for the cloud will help you save time and money down the road.

Finding the right fit with Azure, AWS, or both

With extensive experience deploying solutions in both Azure and AWS, we understand the benefits and challenges of both platforms. Choosing one platform over the other often depends on your business goals.

Cloud Foundation will help you consider factors important to your business, including ease of integration, security, compliance, post-sales service, consumption and ongoing support requirements.

Preparing for Transformation

Most importantly, Cloud Foundation will help you build the right foundation for success. Over the years, we unfortunately have witnessed cloud decisions based on technology alone. It’s easy to skip over the organizational changes that are needed for deployments to succeed.

For example, many routine tasks once performed by in-house staff — such as provisioning compute resources, performing system backups, and other administrative functions — will now be the responsibility of the cloud provider. You’ll need formal change management procedures and effective communication with your cloud provider.

Another example is post-sales services. You’ll need to purchase these services to support your cloud, and they should include deployment plans, consumption plans, support services, major incident response plans and cloud services dependency mapping.

Don’t Skip—and Fall!

Cloud Foundation walks you through all the major considerations for your cloud deployment, providing a blueprint for success and needed education to help you understand your environment and service provider better. Skipping Cloud Foundation in your cloud journey can bring some unpleasant surprises you can easily avoid through preparation.

Let us help you create a strong foundation for your cloud success so transforming your organization isn’t such a scary proposition.

Ready to Get Started?

Lightstream’s Cloud Foundation takes a comprehensive view of your cloud environment and addresses key areas such as core cloud platform, disaster and backup recover, scaling and automation, data platform, devops/devsecops and workload migration.