Organizations looking to modernize their infrastructure should avoid a lift and shift approach to their data workloads so they can better realize the benefits of modern cloud services.
Cracking the code on collecting, managing, analyzing and using data to make better business decisions and innovate is a matter of corporate survival. The problem is that data across organizations is typically contained in silos and isolated across multiple sources, with business units holding on to files in disparate locations. When it comes to modernizing in the cloud, there is an opportunity to improve not only the underlying infrastructure but access to the data as well.
To accelerate this outcome, some organizations choose to adopt a lift and shift migration approach in which applications and their associated data are moved to the cloud with minimal or no change. This approach may provide short-term benefits for companies that need a quick path to production, but it will not enable organizations to fully leverage the benefits of modern cloud services. It also will not address challenges enterprises often look to resolve with a move to the cloud.
One common mistake executives make is prioritizing the lift and shift approach, which can push cloud migration costs off the charts. The better business decision for many on-premises workloads is to not move them at all. Rather, the best move may be to rewrite and redeploy them in a cloud-native way or replace them completely with a software-as-a-service alternative.
Hastily opting to go with the rehost approach to defer the cost of modernizing or replacing critical applications can lead to higher cloud operating costs after migration.
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Rather than choose the easier lift and shift route, businesses should look to aggregate disparate data sets into a centralized data lake. This provides more agility and flexibility than traditional data management systems and allows companies to store all their data—structured and unstructured—in a secured central repository.
Effective data lakes deliver low-cost, scalable storage and support search and analysis capabilities across an array of data types.
Robust data lake architectures allow you to easily tag, search, share and govern specific data subsets across your organization and with other external users. They let you catalog new data sets, upload data sets with searchable metadata and create data profiles for existing data sets with minimal effort.
In addition, adopting DevOps methodologies such as continuous integration/continuous delivery and associated orchestration tools enables the organization to create automated pipelines with complex workflows. This ensures that data integrity within large, complex environments is maintained from source extraction through to processing and presentation. By centralizing data, businesses create opportunities to become data driven, taking advantage of cloud services that allow them to innovate at the pace required to stay relevant in dynamic market conditions.
Speeding Up Development With Cloud-Native Services
The Star Entertainment Group, for one, recognized the importance of adopting DevOps best practices to streamline its development cycle. The integrated resort company provides a wide range of services, including gaming and entertainment, to more than 18 million guests every year. It also manages the Gold Coast Convention and Exhibition Centre for the Queensland government.
The Star wanted better scalability and flexibility and was looking to migrate its public website infrastructure from a third-party hosted virtual platform to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. Its plans involved a complete website redesign and the introduction of toolsets and technologies to maximize the benefit of running a cloud infrastructure. The company’s goal was to make a seamless transition while ensuring customer experience and site performance would not be adversely affected.
Part of its strategy included deploying DevOps best practices to automate and streamline its build and deployment pipeline. The Star turned to AWS partner CyberCX for guidance.
One of Australia's leading cybersecurity services providers, CyberCX is the first local AWS partner to join the Authority to Operate on AWS Program. This program aims to support AWS partners in addressing customers' authorization needs, which include architecting, configuring, deploying and integrating tools and controls.
CyberCX adopts DevSecOps best practices to provide a range of automated build, configuration and deployment services on the AWS cloud platform, from integrated security testing and monitoring to continuous compliance. AWS customers rely on CyberCX's expertise to resolve various business challenges, including fraud detection, churn reduction and predictive analytics.
CyberCX helped the Star deploy an AWS solution that includes several managed services, which collectively enable the company to spend less time on systems administration. They include AWS Relational Database Service (RDS), AWS ElastiCache, auto-scaling, and configuration management tools to ensure a consistent and repeatable fleet.
With the successful deployment, the Star's development team now has more time to focus on building and releasing improvements as well as feature enhancements to its online applications. And for enterprise customers such as the Star, public cloud solutions powered by AWS offer the scalability and flexibility needed in a robust hosting platform for big data workloads.
