Enterprise
Cloud Services

In short, yes. Cloud providers can invest significant resources into providing a suite of design principles and implementation resources that meet some of the highest industry security needs. Typically these solutions offer far greater security than many organizations require or can implement themselves. Adopting cloud-first application development and a cloud hosting strategy allows the implementation of greater security than your organization may currently support - for far less investment than uplifting in-house security would entail.

However, cloud operations and development teams within your organization still have a responsibility to design and implement secure application and networking practices within the cloud solutions they produce and maintain. A security chain is only as good as its weakest link, so secure methods and ongoing due diligence are always required - this fact remains valid for both on-premise and cloud solutions.

Agility and scalability are typically the primary benefits of using virtualized infrastructure within a cloud provider. Cloud solutions reduce infrastructure procurement, configuration, and scaling inertia, bringing it closer to software development. Solution implementation teams can quickly spin up resources when implementing new requirements or scaling existing capabilities to meet user demand. Scalability can even be automated, allowing precise infrastructure provisioning to meet fluctuating demand over time - users receive the application experience they expect whenever they need it. Organizations minimize their costs when demand decreases for their typical usage cycles. There can also be significant cost-reduction benefits when organizations reduce the burden of maintaining their own infrastructure and data centers.

Enterprise cloud services provide a middle ground between legacy server-focused infrastructure, managed internally within an organization, and fully outsourced compute and storage infrastructure managed by third-party cloud services providers. Enterprises can offer internal cloud services by virtualizing the compute and storage clusters within their own data centers. This middle ground often appeals to organizations that want to maintain complete internal control of their products, data, and infrastructure while still providing the benefits that solution implementation teams expect from a cloud services provider.

However, many such organizations have realized that the complete externalization of infrastructure management to a third-party provider can mean significant cost savings and more robust solution implementations. Cloud providers are increasingly able to offer solutions that exceed robustness, scalability, locality, and security requirements - all at a more competitive price point than organizations can manage internally.

Our agency focuses on solutions based on public cloud vendors rather than internally-managed enterprise cloud services. However, we can help establish strategies for migration from private internal enterprise clouds to public cloud equivalents.

The benefits of cloud adoption are clear. While infrastructure is a critical part of every successful software product, it provides little inherent value if considered a standalone concept. A product’s value derives from the data it uses and the intellectual property of its software implementation, not the infrastructure used to run it. Businesses that can focus on this value come to realize the commodity nature of infrastructure. Managing compute and storage infrastructure internally within an organization is likely not an option for startups looking for maximum agility. It is also becoming increasingly difficult for large enterprises to justify when they are looking at reducing costs through consolidation around their businesses' value-generating areas.

Specific design principles are required when designing cloud-first applications to realize the full benefits that cloud platforms allow. These are based on axioms around the commoditization of infrastructure and capabilities that refine many pre-existing technology industry concepts. Principles such as simplification and decoupling, where discrete services and capabilities are created based around single responsibilities and loosely coupled together, are crucial to creating a maintainable and scalable solution.

Just as with any software system, correct understanding and utilization of infrastructure and commodity middleware capabilities are critical for its success. Insufficient or misconfigured infrastructure can easily result from a lack of knowledge of the underlying software architecture design or lack of capacity planning around the system’s expected usage and scalability requirements. This misalignment of software requirements versus infrastructure provisioned can cause a range of problems, including an inability to meet user demand and budgetary waste.

It is essential to understand how a system is composed, each component’s performance characteristics, and the size and shape of data at each stage of the overall data flow. Having this knowledge allows a cloud architect to properly select and configure infrastructure and middleware to realize the software solution’s full value potential.

Some organizations want additional flexibility in how their solutions are hosted, preferring to rely on a range of cloud vendor platforms instead of typical single vendor lock-in. Utilizing multi-cloud architecture comes with additional challenges and overheads to maintain. Still, it can provide benefits such as using the most cost-effective offering at any given time and increased resiliency. The extra layer of cloud concept virtualization typical of a multi-cloud architecture can also help when migrating between different cloud vendors. Organizations can operate their solutions within a single vendor but avoid excessive lock-in and any need to re-implement solutions if they reach a point where an alternative cloud vendor will provide a more beneficial service.

The value of a software product is derived mainly from the data that it processes. Enterprises are beginning to appreciate this fact and are implementing data-focused strategies rather than those based around individual product silos. These strategies typically involve identifying, externalizing, unifying, and connecting datasets across the broader organization. Both internal and customer products can then access the centralized data authorities and combine them in innovative ways, exposing higher value than the sum of the individual parts.

Implementations can take the form of data services that provide APIs for external solutions to integrate with, including customer-facing integrations where data APIs become marketable products. More complex implementations may involve "data lakes," where central storage capabilities provide large scale data ingestion and access mechanisms to application development teams. These capabilities can be self-service or managed via centralized groups that hold authority for particular datasets. Cloud data management solutions are typically well suited to "big data,” providing compute capabilities that can run transformation, derivation, or similar data operations adjacent to or within the data storage layer itself. Thus, maximizing performance when dealing with internet-scale datasets.