Migrating to the cloud? You need a cloud assessment

Ready to ditch the datacenter and migrate to the cloud?

You’re not alone. In a study conducted by O’Reilly in January 2020, more than 88% of the organizations surveyed have already adopted cloud to some extent, with most expecting to grow their usage in the next year. Furthermore, around 25% of companies said they planned to move all of their applications to the cloud within the following year. And with the recent upswing of remote workers, cloud adoption will escalate even further.

Moving to the cloud makes good business sense, delivering benefits like increased agility, scalability, and cost savings. Furthermore, with the transformative opportunities provided by AI, ML, IoT, and other advanced technologies, there’s never been a better (or more critical) time.

Of course, migrating to the cloud is easier said than done, particularly for larger organizations.

There’s the business side of things: stakeholders, business objectives, mission-critical processes, and budget. You’ve got to identify and deal with interconnected workflows, legacy applications, industry regulations, and data security. Then, there are existing equipment investments, licensing, network requirements, SLAs, and more.

Understanding and planning around these and other complex variables and dependencies are critical to helping ensure a cost-effective, secure, and successful migration to the cloud.

Which is why you need to invest in a cloud assessment. Below, I’ll share with you what a cloud assessment is, how it can benefit you, and how Beyondsoft can help. If you have questions or want to learn more, be sure to give us a shout.

What is a cloud assessment?

A cloud assessment is a comprehensive, best practice-driven evaluation of your organization’s cloud readiness and needs, both now and in the future. The assessment looks across your business, stakeholders, processes, workloads, and existing IT investments. It delves into areas such as security and compliance requirements, current and future needs, internal IT talent, budget, and estimated costs.

The result is a comprehensive migration plan, which includes a roadmap customized to your needs and budget and predicted return on investment.

How does a cloud assessment benefit you?

Moving to the cloud can be a worthwhile undertaking—especially if you’re set up for success from the start. A comprehensive cloud assessment can help you do this.

Ensure your strategy aligns with business objectives

You need more than an executive mandate to move to the cloud. You need a strategy that supports business needs, now and in the future. A cloud assessment involves stakeholders across the business to understand and accommodate current and future needs and use cases as well as budgets to make sure that your cloud strategy aligns with your business.

Reduce risks

The larger your environment, the more complex your migration effort—and the higher the risk. Gaining a comprehensive understanding of your environment—including infrastructure, applications, data, licensing, warranties, processes, and workloads—is critical to making sure that no detail gets overlooked, minimizing downtime and ensuring end-to-end security.

An assessment also looks at industry standards and regulations to keep your business in compliance. Finally, an assessment looks at your organization’s people. One of the most significant risks often comes down to people and not having the right skillsets. Ensuring you have the right expertise is critical to avoiding costly issues and delays.

Get a realistic cloud migration roadmap

There are many moving parts to migrating to the cloud and plenty of questions to be answered, such as: which platforms make the best business sense? Do you need a hybrid solution? What is the scope of the project? What workload should you migrate first? How will you manage the environment?

And the list goes on. These are some of the pressing questions that get answered during a cloud readiness assessment. Having a realistic, clearly defined roadmap helps facilitate a smoother migration, setting you up for long term success.

Are you ready to move forward with a cloud assessment?

As a strategic IT firm, global enterprise customers have trusted Beyondsoft for more than two decades—including the world’s top technology companies. As proven experts in cloud computing technology and cloud migration, we can help you reach your business goals and make your cloud journey a successful one. We partner with our customers to design robust business processes that can adjust and scale according to changing business needs. We offer proven expertise in all the top cloud platforms, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google CloudPlatform.

To learn more about our cloud advisory services, including Cloud Readiness Assessments, contact our experts today.

Work from anywhere: Remoting workers with Windows Virtual Desktop

As the COVID-19 pandemic rapidly unfolded in 2020, Beyondsoft management took swift action to protect their global workforce. The office doors were shut, locked, and employees were notified to work from home. In moments, employees needed to work remotely and securely, and do their jobs from anywhere in the world.

A large number of Beyondsoft personnel rely on a custom, Windows-based application. Employees without a Windows PC or laptop at home can’t run that application to do their job. Additionally, this custom application requires steady and rapid data throughput to run well. Some employees are limited to using a data-metered cell phone connection from home. The company needed a flexible solution that was easy to manage with rapid deployment.

Windows Virtual Desktop

Microsoft provides the ideal solution with Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD). WVD is a new cloud Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) offered by Microsoft as part of Azure and Microsoft 365. Even better, WVD is free to anyone with a Windows 10 Enterprise or MS 365 subscription.

WVD is optimized to work with Windows 10, Office 365, multi-session virtual machine images. The platform was perfect for our employees who only needed O365, Web, and network access. We deployed this desktop type for anyone who didn’t need specialized tools nor a persistent desktop.

For those employees who required the custom application, we deployed a customized virtual desktop to WVD.

Employees with Windows laptops at home can easily access these virtual desktops using any modern Web browser. A free HTML5 client allows anyone with a MAC, iPad, Android, and others, access to Windows Virtual Desktops in the Azure Cloud. This solves the problem of the differing hardware and operating systems that our employees use from home.

Windows Virtual Desktops, and the software running on them, are hosted in the Azure Cloud. This means that data consumed by Beyondsoft’s custom Windows application passes to the cloud desktop, and not the employees’ local device. Only the desktop visuals are sent over the Web to the employees’ device at home. Our employees can now use the custom application without requiring a high-speed data connection to their home since they only see the remote desktop screen.

Security, performance, and availability

WVD offers multiple security features to protect company data and resources. We took advantage of WVDs latest security technology by enabling dual-factor authentication and Mobile Device Management for our employees. If a device is lost or stolen, corporate resources won’t be compromised.

To maximize availability and performance for remote users, WVD is deployed simultaneously to many regions around the world. We chose the closest area to each workforce to minimize latency.

Managing Windows Virtual Desktop

WVD is a brand-new Azure service and is continuously being updated and improved. One such improvement is the WVD management portal or UI. The UI allows us to navigate our WVD deployments and perform basic tasks such as adding and removing users.

Beyondsoft is a Microsoft partner offering Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) services in the Azure Marketplace, so WVD seemed the ideal solution for our own needs. WVD provides many benefits that we can take advantage of to minimize costs while maximizing security and availability. As COVID-19 continues to impact people and businesses across the world, remote work has become more prevalent and important than ever. Join our team of experts on Thursday, May 21st at 1:30pm PT to learn how you can set your team up for future success!

Serverless architecture Series (Part 2: Deeper dive into serverless architecture)

I hope my previous blog gave you got a good start at learning about serverless architecture. As promised, here is some more information on this topic to enrich your understanding of this implementation pattern. That’s right, in my opinion it is an implementation pattern. Because if you dig deeper, it’s not like there aren’t going to be any servers or backend systems. There will still be functions deployed as microservices, but isolated to a level that it’s easy for it to be scaled quickly.

So what makes an application serverless?

There are essentially four features that help convert your traditional functions and services to serverless. These are:

Zero administration – One of the primary goals of the serverless-based microservices model is to provide the freedom to developers to deploy the code without provisioning anything beforehand, or managing anything afterward. No more dependency on the infrastructure/Ops teams. No concept of an instance, OS running on that instance, or any instance management overheads.

Auto-scaling – Secondly, serverless-by-design lets your service providers manage the scaling challenges. There’s no need to fire alerts or write scripts to scale up and down. This allows for handling peaks and turfs in traffic and also the occasional lulls on the weekends, without any manual intervention. Tech serenity, if you ask me!

Pay per use – The concept of Function as a service provides the ability to compute and manage services based on usage, rather than pre-provisioned capacity. No more paying for idle time. The results could be significant, in some cases up to 90% cost savings over a cloud virtual machine. That’s real business value right there.

Increased velocity – Driven by the quick-to-market needs of today’s business models, this whole concept of being serverless gives developers the proverbial ‘wings’ and enables them to deliver functions on the fly. This is great for the Agile model of proving a functional concept and then designing it further.

To summarize, the major advantages of a traditional cloud model vs serverless are:

Cheaper than traditional cloud – you only pay for the time these functions are running

Scalable – support your business spikes and lows more efficiently

Lower human resources – Once its set and configured, theoretically the system does not need human intervention. You do need to monitor the logs and take actions when the system performs out of the set limits

Focus on user experience – this is key for business. As discussed throughout this blog, the whole concept gives business the ability to be agile in a true sense, allows them to try out new things, and fail quicker and move on to business models that actually work. It’s a win-win for any business.

Is serverless the silver bullet?

Well, not exactly. As with any other new technology, it does come with its own challenges. Some of the obvious ones include:

Vendor lock in – At this point, the cloud service providers do not provide cross compatibility. Why would they? It’s not in their best interest. So as a consumer, you are locked in with the platform where you start. From the developer’s perspective, this is not as bad. Though when they have to integrate with services hosted on a different platform, they may have to negotiate a lot of challenges, such as connectivity, protocols, security and so on.
Learning curve – Serverless is a new concept and it does take some time for teams to ramp up to make the best out of it. Nevertheless, there are new developments happening all the time. For example, there are a Serverless Kit and a Serverless Platform being designed by some experts, which are supposed to ease all the challenges mentioned here.
- Tip: I’ll be covering the severless kit in one of my upcoming blogs. Do keep an eye out for that!

But is it secure?

Absolutely, as long as you make it so.

As the architects would tell you, the details are in the design! As with any enterprise service, you need to design with security as a primary requirement of your application. You need to account for the fact that users will be interacting with this service directly, sometimes using their credentials. So, it is important to clearly understand how to limit what resources they have access to, what they can and cannot read and write.

It is highly likely that your service would be interfacing with 3rd party services, and it is imperative to consider the access to that service. For example, with Firebase (a real-time streaming database), you write custom security rules that are executed by the database engine to determine which users can read or write from different parts of the database. If you are writing your own micro-services, then you need to ensure that your services check the authenticity of the security token passed and verify the rights of the user.

I hope this blog helped you get a deeper understanding of serverless services. I’ll continue with our series in the next installment, covering a toolkit that helps reduce the burden of starting with this great platform. It has an obvious name of ‘Serverless Framework Toolkit.’ Until then, adios!