What is Cloud Adoption? Transforming How Businesses Scale and Innovate

In the early days of computing, companies relied heavily on physical infrastructure to store data, develop software, and run applications. This “on-premise” infrastructure approach required significant investment in physical hardware, dedicated IT teams for maintenance, and constant upgrades to handle growing demands. For example, if a company needed to scale up its operations, it had to purchase additional bare metal servers and set them up manually, enduring downtime during configuration and hoping they wouldn’t be underutilized during off-peak times. Software development also faced challenges due to limited collaboration tools and long deployment cycles. Teams worked in silos, and testing environments were restricted by the capacity of on-site systems. Data backups were tedious and vulnerable to disasters like fires or floods, threatening business continuity.

Cloud adoption addressed these limitations and offered businesses a way to innovate faster, scale effortlessly, and improve resilience. Organizations adopting cloud technology could tap into on-demand computing power, paying only for what they use. The retail industry can scale up for seasonal sales like Black Friday with a few clicks—no downtime, no over-provisioned servers during quieter times. Developers collaborate by accessing shared cloud environments, fastening deployment cycles, and ensuring testing and integration across global teams. Healthcare and financial sectors can secure data in their business operations with encrypted backups across multiple regions, eliminating the single points of failure. Read on to understand cloud adoption, how it works, and the best practices for the migration.

What is cloud adoption?

Cloud adoption is the process of integrating cloud computing technologies, services, and infrastructure into an organization’s operations to improve scalability, flexibility, and efficiency. It involves transitioning from on-premises systems to cloud-based solutions or incorporating a hybrid cloud model that combines both.

How does cloud adoption work?

The cloud adoption process involves several steps, each aiming for a smooth transition to cloud-based solutions. Here’s a detailed, step-by-step explanation of how cloud adoption works:

Discovery and assessment

The first step in cloud adoption involves discovering and assessing your current IT framework. Start by evaluating their existing applications, infrastructure, and data assets to understand their state and readiness for migration. This includes using discovery tools to take inventory of systems, analyze application dependencies, and classify workloads based on complexity, cloud readiness, criticality, and migration feasibility. Conduct a cost-benefit analysis to assess the cloud ROI and financial impact and determine the value cloud adoption will bring to your organization.

Defining cloud architecture

Once the assessment is complete, the next step is to design the cloud architecture supporting the migration. Select a suitable cloud deployment model—public, private, or hybrid and determine the type of service model—IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS that aligns with your needs. The architecture design involves creating a logical structure that includes compute, storage, and networking requirements, defining cloud services, and framing security policies, governance frameworks, and identity access management (IAM) for user roles and permissions. This ensures that the cloud environment is both functional and secure.

Building a landing zone

After defining the architecture, establish a landing zone as the foundational cloud environment where workloads will be migrated. This involves setting up virtual networks, subnets, and storage while implementing essential security controls such as cloud firewalls, cloud encryption, and logging mechanisms. Deploy automation tools or scripts to simplify the setup process and test the landing zone using trial workloads to confirm its readiness for larger-scale migration.

Cloud migration strategy

Migration execution involves transferring workloads to the cloud. Choose an appropriate cloud migration strategy depending on the complexity of each workload. Rehosting, or lift-and-shift, moves applications with minimal changes, while re-platforming optimizes applications for the cloud environment. Refactoring, on the other hand, involves redesigning applications to use cloud-native features. Cloud migration tools provided by cloud vendors are used to simplify the process, and real-time monitoring ensures a smooth transition with minimal disruption.

Integration and testing

Once workloads are migrated, integration and testing occur to confirm their cloud functionality. Perform rigorous testing to ensure applications operate as expected and can integrate with your existing systems. Verify connectivity with databases and other applications and test failover mechanisms.

Optimization and scaling

After successful integration, the focus shifts to optimizing the cloud environment for efficiency and cloud scalability. Use cloud monitoring tools to track resource usage and application performance. Implement autoscaling to manage workload fluctuations dynamically and adjust configurations to eliminate underutilized resources. Once autoscaled, periodically update governance policies to accommodate new cloud tools, services, or evolving compliance requirements, ensuring your cloud environment remains strong and adaptable.

Benefits of cloud adoption

Cloud adoption eliminates the need for upfront hardware investments, allowing teams to focus on development without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. Beyond cost savings, it improves resilience, operational efficiency and offers the following benefits:

Faster time-to-market

The cloud provides you with on-demand access to resources, eliminating long procurement cycles for hardware and infrastructure. This allows your business to launch new projects and services faster than traditional on-premises systems.

Scalability and flexibility

The cloud allows you to scale resources up or down quickly to meet changing business needs. Whether handling a sudden surge in traffic or deploying new applications, the cloud provides the flexibility to adapt without delay.

Improved disaster recovery

You can access geographically distributed data centers and disaster recovery tools with cloud solutions. For example, during a regional outage, a cloud provider can automatically failover your operations to a different data center, ensuring continuous access to critical applications.

Challenges of cloud adoption

Cloud adoption opens up new growth opportunities but requires expertise in cloud technologies. A lack of skilled professionals, coupled with the challenges below, can slow down the transition process and impact the effectiveness of cloud implementation.

Legacy system integration

Integrating existing on-premises systems with the cloud can be complex and time-consuming. Many legacy applications require re-engineering or replacement. During the migration, you might encounter compatibility issues or disruptions to business-critical processes. For example, older ERP systems require custom solutions for modern cloud platforms.

Data migration complexity

Moving large volumes of data to remote servers involves challenges like ensuring data integrity, minimizing downtime, and maintaining cloud compliance. Transferring sensitive data, especially across regions or between incompatible formats, can lead to delays or errors. For instance, migrating petabytes of historical customer data might require advanced tools and detailed planning to avoid loss or corruption.

Vendor lock-in risks

Relying heavily on a cloud provider can limit your flexibility and make switching providers costly and difficult. You may find that proprietary tools or APIs used during cloud adoption are incompatible with other platforms. For example, an application designed specifically for one cloud service provider may require significant effort to reconfigure for another cloud.

8 best cloud adoption practices

To ensure efficient cloud adoption, monitor cloud metrics continuously. In addition to regularly analyzing these metrics, you can implement the following practices that best align with your cloud strategy and business goals.

1. Conduct pilot testing

Start your cloud journey with a pilot project. Identify a low-risk workload to migrate first, allowing you to test your cloud strategy, configurations, and deployment models in a controlled environment. Use this opportunity to gather insights on cloud migration efficiency, potential risks, and cloud cost behaviors. Adjust your processes based on the results to refine your full-scale migration approach.

2. Deploy serverless functions

Integrate serverless functions, like Digitalocean Serverless Functions, to manage specific workloads without provisioning entire servers. This approach minimizes costs and reduces the management burden. Start by identifying workflows or services with sporadic demand and offloading them to serverless, where you’ll pay only for execution time, maximizing resource efficiency.

3. Use automation effectively

Cloud automation tools schedule repetitive tasks such as infrastructure provisioning, monitoring, and scaling. Automation reduces human error, saves time, and allows your teams to focus on innovation. For example, you can automate the deployment of virtual machines or configure autoscaling for workloads experiencing fluctuating demand.

4. Secure data encryption

To protect sensitive data, encrypt both data at rest and in transit. Use the cloud provider’s built-in encryption services and ensure they comply with regulatory standards. Manage encryption keys using a cloud-based key management solution and limit access permissions to prevent data breaches and unauthorized access and safeguard sensitive information.

5. Apply cloud cost management

Control cloud costs by regularly reviewing and optimizing resource usage. Tag each resource to track its purpose and costs. Implement budgets and alerts for cost savings to prevent overspending. Periodically review your cloud investments, such as instances and storage configurations, to ensure you’re not over-provisioned. To turn off during off-hours, apply auto-scaling and scheduling for non-production resources, such as dev environments.

6. Define IAM policies

Set up clear IAM policies to control access to cloud resources. Only give permissions based on the principle of least privilege and regularly audit IAM roles and permissions. Follow cloud security best practices, use multi-factor authentication (MFA), and implement role-based access controls (RBAC) to limit exposure of sensitive data and functionality, reducing the risk of unauthorized access.

7. Enable disaster recovery

Design a strong disaster recovery plan tailored to your cloud environment. Determine each application’s recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO), then configure backups, redundancy, and failover capabilities accordingly. Regularly test your disaster recovery procedures to confirm they work and are easily executable by your team in case of an actual event.

8. Set up cloud governance

Define clear cloud governance policies to ensure compliance, security, and cost-efficiency. Assign a dedicated cloud governance team to establish, enforce, and review cloud policies and guidelines. Establish reporting tools that provide visibility into resource usage and compliance adherence, and conduct regular audits to ensure your policies align with industry standards and regulations.

Simplify cloud adoption and deploy your applications with DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean offers a range of powerful, developer-friendly products to help you build, scale, and easily manage your applications:

• Droplets: Virtual machines designed for simplicity and speed, allowing you to deploy and scale applications in seconds. Droplets are customizable, letting you choose the OS and size that fit your project’s needs.
• GPU Droplets: DigitalOcean’s GPU-optimized Droplets provide high-performance computing power tailored for tasks like machine learning, AI, and video processing. These droplets combine the power of GPUs with simplicity, enabling efficient handling of resource-intensive workloads.
• DigitalOcean Kubernetes (DOKS): A fully managed Kubernetes service that makes container orchestration easy and efficient. With DigitalOcean Kubernetes, you can deploy, scale, and manage containerized applications effortlessly.
• App Platform: A platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solution that enables you to build, deploy, and scale apps without managing infrastructure. Focus on writing code while the platform handles provisioning, scaling, and monitoring.
• Spaces: An object storage solution designed for scalability and reliability. Spaces make it easy to store and deliver large amounts of unstructured data, such as media files or backups, with a global content delivery network (CDN).
• Volumes: DigitalOcean’s block storage solution enables storage scaling by attaching additional capacity to droplets. With the flexibility to resize as needed, it ensures storage scales alongside applications.
• Managed Databases: Fully managed database solutions for PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Kafka, Redis, Caching, and OpenSearch. DigitalOcean Databases offer automated backups, scaling, and high availability to keep your data secure and accessible.
• Load Balancers: Automatically distribute traffic across your infrastructure to ensure high availability and reliability. With built-in health checks, Load Balancers keep your apps running smoothly.

Experience the simplicity and power of DigitalOcean to accelerate your cloud adoption journey today!