Will a cloud native solution solve the business challenges you are facing? Bring the following arguments for hybrid environments into the next meeting for your upcoming cloud migration or greenfield cloud project. The conversations you will engage in become useful when you define what you really need in terms of infrastructure.

Lift and shift is a dream that sometimes comes true

Recall that lift and shift is the process of rehosting an application or workload, from one environment to another. It may look like the optimal solution, seen from the time perspective.

But is lift and shift feasible in your situation?

Managed cloud services do bring the infrastructure cost and maintenance time down, while at the same time they offer services that require specific cloud provider knowledge — On top of the business value knowledge such as machine learning, server operations and APIs, CI/CD work, business logic coding, just to rattle off a few aspects.

Are you going to scale across geographical regions, or will you operate in more than one country? If not, consider the benefits of local providers as well.

If you are moving existing solutions into the cloud, then the popular lift and shift method comes across as a simple and smooth solution. But it is not always feasible. You (and your developer leads) will surely see the different best practises for developing solutions that run in a public cloud provider’s data center. It is by no means the same as your private datacenter, “just owned by someone else”, there comes a range of business value services, management and governance areas of knowledge that has direct implications to the way you do work.

Will 100% public cloud fit your existing solution and geography?

Managed cloud services have specific APIs and solutions for infrastructure provisioning. There are multi-cloud tools out there to assist, which then add another layer to the chosen cloud provider technology that you will use.

What is the ROI of investing time and money into the specific cloud technology services?

Just because something is “hot” and “new” does not mean it will be successful in the context of your cloud project or migration.

Label your cloud project and map it to available resources

The acronyms IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS have important hidden aspects to them. As you specify the label for your venture online, you are well advised to think about exactly what you will control in-house, technology-wise, and what you will leverage cloud services for.

Which layer of abstraction is your business operating in? Do you need to configure and optimize underlying hardware, or, is the (business) application operating in the world of the web, and there as a cloud-based app (SaaS)?

Consider legislation and data storage

Is your application associated with laws such as GDPR , CCPA, HIPAA, or others?

Then all of a sudden you are going to benefit greatly from the cloud providers offers for data protection. But do you still have the need for on-premise servers for your business case? That leads you into an exciting world of networks and hybrid connections between the cloud provider and your datacenter. Just as exciting is the additional overhead of keeping up with legislation and the concrete technical practises to ensure that you meet the evolving requirements. Enter team compliance.