Cloud computing is a digital-era fundamental. It is critical to business agility, helping organisations respond with speed to disruption, bring innovation to market fast and scale rapidly.

In the last three years, Alpha Innovate has been providing cloud consulting to clients of different sizes, operating in different verticals. We have found that all these clients have five factors in common that determine the success of their cloud implementation. These success factors address the concerns that many companies face when making the decision to move to the cloud, and comprise security, performance, connectivity, reliability and cost.

Security

Security in the cloud has been a big topic for the information security teams that we have worked with. With recent headline-grabbing breaches top of mind, moving security-sensitive data has caused concern for security teams.

Data encryption for both in-transit and stationary data (end-to-end encryption) keeps critical information safe from leaks and breaches. When selecting the right cloud provider for your workload, it has been important for many of our clients to settle on the cloud that provides them the ability of choosing when to use encryption keys provided by the cloud provider or using self-generated encryption keys.

A lot of the cloud providers we have worked with provide security tools that use advanced artificial intelligence to understand when personally identifiable user data is left unencrypted. The use of these tools and other privacy controls have been instrumental in staying compliant with privacy legislation such as the Protection of Personal Information Act and ensuring privacy controls are in place, including user data access and time restrictions on data storage limit data exposure.

Additionally, many organisations use security information and event management (SIEM) tools to provide real-time visibility of all security events and incidents. For a workload to be successful in the cloud, it must be integrated into these enterprise-wide tools and have any security incidents in the cloud detected as and when they happen.

Performance

Whether they’re utilising a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider to provide everyday productivity tools or a more robust platform as a service (PaaS) that allows companies to build the software solutions they need, it’s important to find a cloud computing strategy with flexibility, power, high-uptime and the ability to scale services quickly.

The ability to auto-scale accordingly has been a major success factor for most cloud workloads.

Connectivity

However an organisation designs its infrastructure, its network must have extensive connectivity options when it comes to accessing cloud computing providers.

Being able to design your network using technologies like SD-WAN (software-defined wide-area network) can help teams with their cloud connectivity and reduction of latency.

Reliability

Your cloud environment is only useful if users can access any file or data they need, at any time. Preventative maintenance must be proactive to minimise server downtime.

The ability to include site reliability engineering (SRE) as part of your DevOps will be highly critical for your organisation’s success in the cloud. Observability and getting correct reports of what’s happening with your systems are important.

Within the reliability success factor is also the ability to perform what’s called “chaos engineering”, where you introduce a failure and make sure that you fail and recover gracefully.

Cost

Organisations have had traditional methods of issuing budgets to pay for IT infrastructure. Traditional models, however, do not fully support cloud thinking and processes. The budgeting is usually based on capacity planning.

The cloud model, on the other hand, aims to take away the capacity planning model to a model where you use what you need when you need it. Organisations that are successful with their cloud implementations have had to evolve their models to meet this change.

The other factor from a cost perspective has been how the software development environments have been treated. Traditionally, software development teams have a dev, test, QA and production environments. Cloud has offered the flexibility of spinning up an environment when you need it and being able to tear it down when you’re done with it. There is also the flexibility of destroying development environments when the development team is not at work and rebuilding it once they start work.

Successful teams have also been able to use the usage data of their environments to resize their cloud instances based on actual usage data.