Without a specialist cloud partner, you’re missing out on performance and cost savings

When properly managed and configured to the specific needs of your application or service, Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS both offer substantial performance advantages over traditional server infrastructure.  Unfortunately, without the advice and support of a specialist, it’s unlikely that your organisation is fully benefiting from the flexibility, scale and improved reliability that’s available with a genuine and bespoke cloud deployment.

You shouldn’t just replicate existing infrastructure

Both Microsoft and Amazon have made creating a cloud solution to host an application simple – almost too simple.  With the click of a mouse, you can create a suite of virtual machines that perfectly replicate your existing server configuration.

We regularly meet with clients who have been tempted by this simplicity and have self-deployed into Azure, using their existing infrastructure as a blueprint.  In almost all cases, they have gained no benefit to application performance as a result.  This is to be expected, as a replica environment will behave much as the traditional version did – the virtual machine performance is designed to match a given configuration.

The best practice approach isn’t to simply copy what you have, it’s much better to analyse what you need.  In the initial stages of any cloud migration project, our accredited Azure and AWS consultants work closely with client development teams to fully understand the way their application works and identify exactly what levels of performance are required.

Using a blank sheet of paper as a starting point for a solution, architecture removes the tethers to legacy hardware and allows your application to take advantage of the greater flexibility offered.  Rather than using the same server configuration for every component of your network of VMs, a cloud solution can be specified to use lower power (and cheaper) machines where possible and increase power where needed.  This means that your cloud spend is more effective and can improve application performance.

Monitoring & scaling resource

With traditional hosting or colocation, you would buy a fixed amount of capacity in a data centre and a selection of services would be layered on top for management.  Non-specialist companies often take the same approach to cloud deployments, delivering a static environment that is deemed fit for purpose.

The cloud is different, offering much more flexibility.  Rather than being constrained to a static environment, a specialist partner can create a more dynamic solution for your application that scales up and down based on demand.  This means that your users benefit from better performance under load and you benefit from lower costs because you no longer need to pay for resources when you’re not using them.

Taking advantage of additional services

Without awareness of the range of additional services that Azure and AWS offer, many cloud users only use a suite of Virtual Machines.  Both major public cloud platforms have the built-in ability to schedule backups and allow for near-instant recovery in the event of data loss.  An experienced consultant can architect a solution that splits data across multiple data centres which can reduce downtime to 0.

Data loss or an inaccessible application are two of the biggest risks to software companies.  As such, it pays to plan for failure when developing your architecture plan – something that inexperienced consultants will often fail to do.