A Smart Approach to Moving Workloads to the Hyperscale Cloud

September 20, 2017

Hyperscale public cloud technologies open up tremendous opportunities for efficiency and elasticity for production workloads, backup, and disaster recovery, just to name a few. But for IT staff, a key question often arises: Which workloads are best suited for hyperscale cloud and which provider offers the most value for my business?

Choose poorly, and you could make life difficult for your IT operations for months. Choose well, and within a short timeframe, you can start reaping the benefits for your business. The major hyperscale cloud providers — Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — each handle certain workloads really well. But if you’ve never worked with them before, it’s hard to know where to start. Conducting a workload assessment can clarify things.

Advantages of workload assessments

A structured assessment of your IT workloads can help you identify the best match between your workload characteristics and the various hyperscale cloud providers. Additionally, it identifies where workloads have dependencies which must be addressed in making a transition to cloud. This information helps you develop a cloud architecture that dovetails into your wider business goals.

An effective assessment will help you understand that is possible to move, weigh the pros and cons of public, private, and hybrid cloud configurations, and determine which workloads and applications work best with specific providers. From a financial view, the assessment clears away confusion and helps underscore the value of shifting from to an op-ex model from a cap-ex model.

That can also help you uncover opportunities to do more impactful work with existing IT resources.

How OnX conducts workload assessments

OnX developed our Workload Assessment Service to help companies realize their journey to cloud. Admittedly, it requires some upfront investment, but having both a well-defined destination and a clear roadmap of how to get there from a proper workload assessment creates a foundation for tapping the vast potential of hyperscale cloud technologies.

We examine your workloads across your business to:

Identify which workloads within a client environment are best suited to move to a cloud environment
Identify which potential issues in moving a workload to cloud which must be addressed in the architecture
Provide you with an understanding of the cost and work effort to migrate to cloud

Showing you the way forward with hyperscale cloud

There’s so much you can do in the public cloud once you’ve shed the burdens of buying, configuring, and managing data centers. But the way forward is rarely, if ever, self-evident. Shifting to the cloud without a defined target and roadmap from a workload assessment can mean weeks or months of trial-and-error that distract your IT people from their core mission of improving your overall business. That’s where an experienced partner like OnX can make a difference during the transition.

Hyperscale public cloud is a phenomenal tool, but like all tools, it needs to be used properly to achieve your goal; some workloads work fine in the public cloud, while others do great in a hybrid model and a few must be kept in a private cloud. You shouldn’t have to figure all that out on your own.