Why it is Better to be “Cloud-Smart” than “Cloud-First”

According to Gartner, global businesses are expected to spend more than half of their total IT budget on the cloud by 2025. As spending on cloud computing increases exponentially, you must implement the right cloud strategy for your enterprise.

When it comes to cloud computing, organizations around the world have followed a rather aggressive “Cloud-First” strategy up until now. It involved looking at cloud technology as an all-inclusive solution for your organizational challenges. This meant that you had to outpace your competitors to get your hands on the latest offerings from major service providers.

Nevertheless, this paradigm is slowly changing. A major portion of enterprises are struggling to fully leverage the strengths of cloud computing while also experiencing additional challenges like vendor lock-ins, resource overprovisioning, huge cloud bills, etc. All these factors have forced IT decision-makers to look for a different strategy, resulting in the formation of a more sensible approach called “Cloud-Smart”.

In this blog post, we will comprehensively explore the importance of embracing a cloud-smart strategy and explain why it is the right one for your organization. But before we get into the details of the cloud-smart strategy, let’s first try to understand what a cloud-first approach is.

What is a Cloud-First Strategy?

The cloud-first strategy prioritizes the adoption of cloud computing resources over traditional on-prem IT resources. That is, with a cloud-first strategy, you are leveraging the cloud technology to build your new applications, processes, and systems. It involves rapid procurement of cloud resources and migrating the majority portion of your existing workloads to the cloud.

In a way, the cloud-first strategy can be categorized as a high-risk, high-reward approach. If you can pull it off, your organization will experience several advantages, such as:

1. Rapid Deployment of Apps & Services: The cloud-first strategy ensures that you have the perfect platform to design, test, and deploy highly efficient and scalable applications swiftly.
2. Reduced Capital Expenditure: You can eliminate or minimize the need for investment in physical IT infrastructure by provisioning virtualized resources from the cloud.
3. Minimal Maintenance Overheads: Cloud computing service providers handle the maintenance activities of your virtualized resources, allowing you to focus on your business objectives.
4. Vast Global Reach: The cloud data centers are spread across the globe, giving you and your business access to new, unexplored markets.
5. Enhanced Performance: Cloud technology comes with in-built autoscaling and load balancing capabilities, delivering maximum performance levels even in the face of fluctuating demands.

While the cloud-first approach offers several advantages, it also carries significant risks if not executed properly.

Challenges of Adopting a Cloud-First Strategy

Organizations may encounter various challenges when adopting the cloud-first strategy, such as:

1. Overprovisioning of Resources: While rapidly acquiring resources from the cloud, there are high chances that you might end up provisioning more than what you require, driving up your cloud bills as a result.
2. Vendor Lock-Ins: The urgency to rapidly adopt cloud solutions under the cloud-first strategy can lead organizations to become heavily dependent on a single cloud service provider. This creates a scenario of vendor lock-in, where migrating to alternative providers becomes difficult and costly.
3. High Data Transfer Costs: The cloud-first strategy requires all your applications and workloads to be moved to the cloud. This involves a significant amount of data transfer, which translates into additional expenses.
4. Regulatory Compliance Concerns: With the cloud-first strategy, your workloads and applications are moving out of your on-prem data center to a cloud environment. You will have to conduct regular audits to stay compliant with the regulatory mandates and ensure that you protect your customers’ sensitive information.

Why ‘Cloud-First’ May Not Always Be the Best Approach

If you compare the advantages and disadvantages of the cloud-first model, you can clearly see that the success of this strategy is largely dependent on the execution and, more importantly, the readiness of your organization.

For organizations with limited on-prem infrastructure dependency (for instance, a startup or a small and medium-sized enterprise), the cloud-first strategy might not be a bad idea. That is, you don’t have to worry about the complexities of migrating or modernizing your legacy infrastructure, which is one of the primary challenges of a cloud-first strategy. Even then, in the long run, there are high chances that you might end up in a vendor lock-in situation or with a bloated cloud bill that stems from over-provisioning.

For larger organizations that are more accustomed to using legacy applications, the cloud-first strategy might have an adverse effect. Not all workloads or applications are meant for the cloud. Especially if they have been hosted on your on-prem infrastructure for a long period of time. Migrating these traditional, monolithic applications to the cloud often features lengthy and complicated procedures (sometimes even a total revamp of the application architecture), which have a high probability of failure.

All these factors make ‘cloud-first’ obsolete in this modern digital landscape. Especially with inflationary pressure kicking in and major IT decision-makers looking to maximize returns from cloud spend, you must embrace the more sensible “cloud-smart” strategy. In the subsequent sections, we will explain what cloud-smart is while highlighting its major differences from cloud-first and the value add-ons it will bring to your organization.

What is a Cloud-Smart Strategy

The cloud-smart strategy is all about taking a balanced approach to cloud adoption. It focuses on integrating your on-prem infrastructure with cloud services, identifying and selecting the most effective deployment model for your workloads and applications. Unlike the cloud-first strategy, which aims to replace all existing on-premises systems with cloud solutions, the cloud-smart approach recognizes the value of your current infrastructure and seeks to integrate it with cloud services. This way, you can streamline and rationalize your cloud expenses by creating a highly efficient hybrid or multi-cloud ecosystem.

Often characterized by its pragmatic nature, this innovative strategy shifts the focus towards specific industry, business, and technology outcomes that you can achieve with cloud computing. The cloud-smart strategy will help you carry out cloud migrations in different phases, design flexible cloud roadmaps that evolve along with your organization, identify the right cloud solution, and integrate private and public clouds with your existing on-prem infrastructure.

Major Differences Between Cloud-First and Cloud-Smart Strategies

Why Cloud-Smart is the Better Option than a Cloud-First Strategy

In contrast to cloud-first, the cloud-smart strategy delivers numerous benefits to global businesses. Let’s evaluate each of these benefits in detail.

1. Facilitates Selective Cloud Migration:

   The cloud-smart strategy allows you to carefully plan and execute your cloud migration project. Rather than rushing into a full-scale cloud migration in one go, it follows a phased and controlled approach.

   This enables a more comprehensive assessment of your workload and facilitates the gradual modernization of your applications without losing track of your business objectives. With this highly methodical approach, you can lay down a strong foundation for your organization’s overall cloud journey, reducing the associated risks and ensuring a seamless transition to the cloud.

2. Promotes Efficient Resource Utilization:

   The goal of a cloud-smart strategy is to optimize the usage of cloud resources to avoid overprovisioning and overspending. With this approach, you can thoroughly evaluate workload requirements and provision cloud resources accordingly. This promotes better alignment between your actual needs and the resources you consume, leading to efficient resource utilization and cost savings.

3. Enables Hybrid or Multi-Cloud Integration:

   Strategies like cloud-only or cloud-first often overlook the existing on-prem infrastructure and systems as their goal is to achieve complete “cloudification”. But, the cloud-smart approach recognizes the importance of integrating the cloud with an organization’s existing on-premises infrastructure and systems.

   Rather than treating the cloud as a standalone environment, the cloud-smart strategy aims to create a seamless and cohesive hybrid or multi-cloud ecosystem. This integration ensures that you can leverage the benefits of the cloud while preserving your investments in legacy systems and maintaining a unified IT landscape.

4. Helps Mitigate Compliance Risks:

   The cloud-smart strategy emphasizes the need to address regulatory and security requirements throughout the cloud adoption process. By taking a more deliberate and phased approach to cloud migration, you can better identify and address potential compliance challenges. This contrasts with the cloud-first approach, which may overlook important compliance considerations in the rush to rapidly adopt cloud services.

Conclusion

With global businesses looking to maximize their return on cloud investments, taking the cloud-first route is sure to create additional cost challenges and resource wastage. On the other hand, the cloud-smart strategy follows a pragmatic approach to complete cloud migration. This way, you can align your cloud spending to tangible business outcomes while experiencing numerous benefits, such as selective cloud migration, optimal usage of resources, seamless hybrid or multi-cloud integration, and easy mitigation of compliance risks.

Rather than jumping in blindly to the vast pool of cloud resources with a cloud-first strategy, a cloud-smart approach can guarantee a seamless cloud journey and maximum returns on your cloud investment. Want to know more about the cloud-smart strategy? Reach out to our experts at www.gsoftcomm.net.