More and more enterprises are moving their business to the cloud. In fact, it seems inevitable judging by the rate at which cloud computing is being adopted. Gartner even predicted that by 2020, “a corporate ‘no-cloud’ policy will be as rare as a ‘no-Internet’ policy is today.” The cloud is increasingly being relied on to achieve cost-efficiency, scalability, higher application performance and data centre modernisation. However, migrating to the cloud is a complex process that requires careful planning, thought and preparation.
Cloud migration involves moving data, applications or other business components from a company’s on-premise computers to the cloud, or moving them from one cloud platform to another. Before embarking on a cloud migration project, it’s essential for the organisation to know the goals of that migration and consider all possibilities -- both good and bad, because migrating to the cloud may come with certain risks and uncertainties.
The migration of existing workloads is how most companies begin their cloud journey, due to several immediate benefits:
- There’s little to no re-coding involved
- User access to those applications or workloads will remain similar or the same
- The cloud is more flexible, resilient, and less expensive to use than hosted or on-premises servers
But the biggest challenge faced by enterprises when it comes to moving over to the cloud remains to be security, with security concerns restricting their ability to migrate workloads especially to the public cloud. Fortunately, providers of cloud-connected security and storage solutions such as Barracuda aim to make the transition smoother and help organizations securely extend their workloads and applications into cloud environments.
With their “Cloud Ready” initiative, for example, Barracuda is offering free 90-day licenses for the Barracuda NextGen Firewall and the Barracuda Web Application Firewall in both Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, giving companies the flexibility, choice and freedom to begin cloud deployments without upfront costs. Barracuda’s cloud enabled security suite is designed to allow organisations to deploy their applications and workloads securely either on premises or in the cloud faster, more cost-effectively, and with greater confidence.
When enterprises are confident that their cloud deployments are secure, they can focus on other important aspects of the cloud migration journey, choose the best path for their organisation, reap the full benefits of the cloud and take their business to the next level.