When starting a new business with limited resources, it’s important to use team members effectively, putting their individual skills to the best use.
Let’s imagine the company has a very small team with just one developer − it doesn’t make sense for this developer to spend all their time building and maintaining infrastructure, managing networks and coming up with strategies to keep the business secure.
Often, small businesses and new businesses don’t have the expertise to do this, especially to make sure everything they do is done with best practice in mind.
This is a good reason to embrace cloud. Cloud providers have large and experienced teams of security, networking and infrastructure experts, who know how to do everything with best practices and different certifications and compliance standards in mind.
It just makes sense to leave this kind of thing to them. Even as the business matures, and the development team grows, it is still far more efficient for the developers to be spending their time innovating and building cool stuff. Companies that succeed are normally ones that focus intently on the areas where they have a real competitive advantage.
For our young insurance brand Sanlam Indie, cloud has certainly given us a competitive advantage. But it’s not only about speed. The agility our business has enjoyed in being cloud-first means we can try things out and, if it doesn’t work, just move on to something different.
Moving one-for-one isn’t cost-effective
Every business wants to come up with smart ways to cut costs without compromising on the quality of the product or service offered.
A plan to move existing operations to the cloud, embracing what is called a ‘lift and shift’ approach, one may find that the overall costs are a lot higher than expected.
When going multi-cloud, there will be a backup if something goes down. This guarantees the agility modern businesses are after.
When there is already a legacy estate, moving one-for-one simply isn’t cost-effective. There will be a need to rewrite some components or pieces of software/websites/application stacks to run efficiently in the cloud.
Yes, migration will be cheaper over the long run, but getting there is going to be a journey.
Avoid running an on-prem company in the cloud
It’s just not cost-effective. And it defeats the purpose of going to the cloud in the first place, because you still need to hire the right people to configure the software and do all the maintenance.
If there are cloud-native products being used, there is no need to worry as it’s the cloud provider’s job to make sure it's secure.
If you look at these big cloud businesses, their financial risk exposure is far bigger than the customer’s financial risk exposure. The average business can't work at the same scale as these large cloud players.
As part of this, it’s important to make sure you are building for the cloud. One can't take experience on-prem or building traditional applications and apply it to the cloud. It needs to be re-architected and built for the cloud.
Have a backup plan
Even with all of this, there could still be a lingering fear: “what if something happens and the whole of AWS or GCP or Azure goes down?”
To safeguard businesses against an outage, changes in the deployment patterns to a code base deployment pattern can be applied to different clouds.
When going multi-cloud, there will be a backup if something goes down. This guarantees the agility modern businesses are after.
If the pricing completely changes on AWS or Azure, for example, and they're no longer a viable provider, or they aren’t cost-effective anymore, you can easily switch to something else.
It’s a good idea to make sure you're not tied into a single cloud, as that's the biggest risk with using cloud-native applications. As soon as there is proprietary application being used, or database technology, you're stuck.
Be mindful of hidden costs
One of the biggest hidden costs is related to bandwidth. Moving data to the cloud (ingress) is free, but when data is being moved in between clouds, in between regions and in between on-prem and the cloud (egress), the use of all this bandwidth can become quite expensive.
It's not cost effective just building servers in the cloud and then pushing data into the cloud. A strategy must be developed that is defined for the cloud and built with the cloud in mind.
Train your developers
Developer training is very important as they must be part of the cloud journey because they have to understand what they're developing for.
It is suggested that businesses provide their developers with a sandbox to test things out. Spend money on infrastructure for them to have the freedom to sort of play around and find new innovative ways of doing stuff in the cloud.
Don’t keep the developers out of the journey, as it’s inevitable that they’re going to be building the wrong thing.
Share