Companies today need to realise that transforming IT to agile and efficient cloud services is a strategic priority - it is no longer a matter of if, but when, and how.
This is according to Krishna Subramanian, VP of product marketing, Cloud Platforms Group at Citrix, who says the key challenges businesses face when implementing cloud platforms are lack of staff expertise, managing app-specific performance on the cloud and moving legacy apps to a cloud architecture.
She adds that the value of a cloud grows as you consolidate more workloads on it; therefore, it is important when choosing a cloud platform that it is extensible to meet not just your immediate needs, but also your long-term needs.
Also, it helps to plan a roadmap of where you want to take your cloud adoption. Most businesses want to start with a few new cloud apps and grow to add more of the enterprise and legacy IT apps as cloud services, says Subramanian.
Knowing this upfront will help you not get locked in to a narrow cloud platform that won't be able to accommodate both your cloud-native and traditional enterprise workloads. Most cloud platforms are built to run on one or the other, but not both, she notes.
She advises that enterprises must be careful not to get locked into a cloud platform by vendors because they may not make it easy for you to leverage other alternatives.
Subramanian suggests that planning which apps you want to transform will help you understand their requirements and ensure that your cloud platform can accommodate these choices. She adds that if a company picks platforms that offer more flexibility, they can make changes to the underlying infrastructure without impacting the apps that run on it.
It is important to understand the APIs that a solution supports, says Subramanian. She adds that when choosing a cloud platform, businesses should consider if the platforms enable it to use its choice of networking, storage and hypervisor technologies.
In conclusion, she advises enterprises to start with a narrow set of use cases, deploy quickly, deliver results, while architecting for flexibility in the longer term and expanding the scope of its deployment as they grow.
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