'Cloud-first' is nonsense, think 'cloud-appropriate', says Sungard

The most important consideration in a cloud migration journey should be resilience

The idea of 'cloud first' is a seductive in its simplicity. Any new projects should go in the public cloud, unless there's a good reason not to put them there. It's the sort of term that sticks in the mind of the CEO, but unfortunately there's a tendency to disregard the qualifier: "unless there's a good reason not to...".

Speaking at Computing's Cloud Live 2019 event on Thursday, Wayne Byrne, sales director Europe at managed services provider Sungard, said that ignoring the alternatives to public cloud can turn out to be an expensive mistake. He brought up the case of a large bank that spent a significant sum building out a new cloud-based service only to fall foul of the authorities.

"They started completely ripping up their banking apps to make them cloud-first," he said. "But then the financial regulator put the boot in, they said: ‘You have to stop that, it's the wrong model, we can't regulate you'", so all that programme of refactoring the banking applications was for nothing.

Cloud may be expanding fast, but then so are other more traditional deployment options. Colocation is also growing at double-digit rates, Byrne pointed out, and traditional data centre spend continues to rise. While cloud offer benefits of agility for certain workloads it is not always the best option. It's not just regulation to watch out for but also latency, integration and costs - CSPs tend to levy very high charges for data egress for example.

Byrne said that businesses moving to cloud tend to focus on the end of the journey, visualising their data and applications already in the cloud, rather than the migration journey itself: the steps required to get them into the chosen cloud platform and how to get them out again when the time comes.

Instead of obsessing about the platform, a business's primary focus should be on resilience, Byrne said, ensuring that systems are optimally replicated and that backup, disaster recovery and business continuity are included in the overall considerations.

"Resilience should be front and centre wherever the app and data reside," he said. "Resilience should be built into every aspect of the transformation journey."

Migrations can be done in a stepwise fashion, from bare metal to virtual server to private cloud to hosted. There's no need to do everything at once; indeed that can introduce complexity and fragility.

Instead of rushing into the cloud, firms should spend more time at the planning stage, setting up cloud centres of excellence to try things out on a small scale before committing, and weighing up all the pros and cons.

"Think about how you measure success. What are the metrics of success? Think of the key things you need to call out and write them down before you start any engagement," Byrne advised.