How to win at Cloud Migration in 2020

Deepak Ramchandani Vensi, Account Principal at Contino, explains the biggest enterprise challenges to cloud migration in 2020.

Challenge: What cloud provider to I choose? 
“Traditionally, organisations do not have the enterprise support structures to onboard providers like Amazon and Google (not the case with Microsoft, who usually have well established support relationships). Instead, they decide to either progress with an RFP or they choose the supplier that’s easier to onboard. Both of these approaches fail to cater for the impact on engineering and the developer experience.

“So, what approach should you take? Perhaps you already have a small team of engineers who are trained in a certain cloud provider. Perhaps you have a product that needs developing that could best use the services provided by a certain cloud provider. Or perhaps the regions in which your business operates and your customers are based are best aligned to the regional availability of a certain cloud provider. 

“In all cases, choosing one initial provider to prove out your organisational maturity for adoption at scale is critical. Which brings us onto our next challenge: trying to take on too much cloud at once!” 

Challenge: Cloud brokers - multi-cloud managers
“It seems strange to have this on the list of challenges and blockers to wide-scale cloud adoption as we approach 2020, but it still manages to lurk around. The next step organisations often see as vital (once they’ve forced their engineering teams into a rigid multi-cloud framework) is to look at multi-cloud management brokers. These provide yet another abstraction framework and an inefficient API set to target in order to provide a ‘service catalogue’.

“The history of cloud brokers has shown that this typically ends in either an expensive bill from the broker or a convoluted engineering mesh that hinders scalability and often leads to frustration within the engineering teams.

“Providing engineering teams with a loosely coupled framework that lets them explore and consume the best that cloud providers have to offer has proven to be the only approach that scales. This can then be complemented with certain domain-specific tools that enable a more effective governance model, without hindering engineering creativity.”

Challenge: Lift and shift techniques from on-premises
“The illusory truth effect tells us that if you say something enough times, even if it’s false, people will believe you. This seems to have been the case when it comes to cloud security. 

“As organisations have woken up to the importance of security when consuming cloud at scale, security teams have continued to tell us that the on-premises approach to cloud security is the safest approach. In reality, applying this data centre thinking to the cloud does nothing to improve an organisation’s security posture. 

“Instead, it leaves behind a cloud environment that isn’t suitable, or flexible enough, for engineering teams to consume due to the restrictive perimeter-based policies that are in place. Additionally, these traditional security approaches bring with them solutions that aren’t designed to use the native services that cloud service providers have to offer. Defaulting to an IaaS based deployment approach results in a bill at the end of the month that negates the business case for cloud.

“Policies to tackle cloud security include policy-as-code: Having your environment defined as code has a plethora of advantages – one of them being the ability to define an organisation’s guardrails into a policy engine (as code) and then subsequently enforcing said policies across the estate and proactively preventing any possible violation.

“Another policy is identity-based and least-privilege security. With the increased number of services and devices that need managing, simply relying on your security perimeter isn’t enough (this is often a practice that is heavily relied upon with on-prem). Identity and least-privilege based approaches force users and services to rely on techniques such as MFA and granular role-based access controls, and have a route to live that is consistent and well managed. Additionally, modern cloud-based identity providers are capable of learning and adapting to user behaviours, providing risk-based scores on the access being granted.”