The Cloud Diaries: Your First 30 Days After Migration
While migration of your on-premises IT infrastructure to the cloud is often seen as the end of the journey, it’s actually just the beginning. In order to see long-term benefits like cost savings, enhanced scalability, improved security, and increased agility, your cloud environment requires ongoing optimization and monitoring.
The First Month: What to Expect
If your business has only used on-prem IT infrastructure and applications, the transition to the cloud could be a bit jarring. That’s because your team likely hasn’t had to worry about budget or optimization management in the past. And if you don’t know what controls to activate (or don’t have a managed services partner like JetSweep to help), you might encounter cost overruns, performance issues, or security vulnerabilities in the first few weeks following a migration.
The good news? Once the proper setup is in place, you’ll likely notice certain differences in your business operations during those first 30 days post-migration. For example, since Amazon Web Services (AWS) only uses the latest intel and AMD chipset drivers, you could experience performance improvements fairly quickly. You might also enjoy peace of mind not having to worry about your server dying or hard drive failing — AWS is constantly making improvements and updating their applications in the background (oftentimes without you even knowing about it).
How to Set Up for Long-Term Success
If you migrate to the cloud with a partner like JetSweep, most of the following controls will be activated during the migration process. Making the move on your own or with your internal team? Follow these guidelines to ensure your environment is cost-efficient and optimized for success.
Cloud Cost and Resource Optimization
Before your CFO is hit with a bill three times the agreed-upon budget, implement the following controls:
- AWS Cost Explorer, Cost Optimization Hub, and AWS Trusted Advisor: Gain visibility into usage trends, uncover inefficiencies, and receive actionable recommendations to improve performance and lower costs.
- AWS Budgets: Set custom cost and usage limits, monitor spending in real time, and receive alerts when you approach or exceed your targets.
- Reserved Instances (RI) and Savings Plans: Receive significant discounts in exchange for long-term usage commitments (typically activated after achieving steady-state utilization).
Utilizing a cloud partner for ongoing optimization can help prevent runaway costs and keep your expenses contained. With our Managed Cloud Service, we implement tools and identify how to improve your environment, giving you time and resources back into your hands for working on the projects you’re best at.
Security and Compliance Foundation
Most companies underestimate the complexity and knowledge required to have a secure and compliant environment. But it’s one of the most important parts of being in the cloud. Taking these actions in the first 30 days post-migration can help ensure a secure and compliant foundation:
Establish a secure environment early: Conduct an initial AWS Well-Architected Review (typically done with a partner) to evaluate your cloud workloads against AWS best practices, identify potential security risks, and strengthen your security posture.
Implement continuous security monitoring: Enable AWS Security Hub, AWS GuardDuty, and AWS IAM Access Analyzer to monitor for threats, analyze access permissions, and receive actionable insights to identify and remediate vulnerabilities.
Set up strong governance controls: Implement AWS Organizations and AWS Control Tower to enable centralized governance, policy enforcement, and standardized account setup across a multi-account environment.
Enforce security best practices: Strengthen security with multi-factor authentication, IAM roles, and least privilege access.
Encrypt sensitive data using AWS Key Management Service (KMS): Create, manage, and control encryption keys to protect your data across AWS services and applications.
Operational Excellence and Reliability
The cloud is not a “set-it-and-forget-it” environment. For success in your first 30 days and beyond, continuous monitoring is required to ensure operations run smoothly and reliably. As such, consider implementing:
- AWS CloudWatch dashboards: What’s your memory utilization? What’s your CPU utilization? What’s your storage utilization? Monitor everything in real time by setting up AWS CloudWatch dashboards for system health visibility.
- AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery: Prioritizing disaster recovery will help to minimize downtime and protect business continuity with rapid failover and failback capabilities for critical workloads.
Cloud FinOps and Tagging Strategy
The cloud will likely be utilized differently across different teams at your business. To determine who should be charged each month:
Create a clear tagging strategy: Define cost allocation tags and organize resources with AWS Resource Groups.
Gain deeper cost visibility: Implement AWS Cost and Usage Reports to track detailed usage and spending trends across the organization.
Make Your First Month a Success
The first 30 days post-migration are some of the most important. If you go live in the cloud without accounting for all of these controls, your business could be susceptible to data breaches, misconfigurations, insider threats, and lack of control over data. A migration partner can help make your business much less vulnerable.
As an Advanced AWS Consulting Partner, we have the knowledge and technical expertise of the AWS suite of tools and resources to ensure exceptional cloud outcomes