Cloud promises many opportunities for improving the agility of your IT team and the scalability of your IT systems. It’s easier to take advantage of these opportunities if you refactor your systems to be cloud native when you execute your cloud migration. However, it’s important to understand that becoming cloud native requires a considerable investment of time and effort, and you need to weigh the advantages of being cloud native against the potential drawbacks, including:
• Migration estimates become longer. It’s pretty clear that it has to take longer to rearchitect an application rather than moving it to the cloud exactly as is. But how much longer will it take? It’s likely to be difficult to get an accurate estimate of the effort, because when you’re doing your first migrations, everything about the cloud is new to your team.
• You lose some flexibility. Once you convert an application to be cloud native, the only environment where it can run is the cloud it’s native to. If you have multicloud infrastructure and need the ability to move applications among your different environments, you’ll lose that capability if you convert applications to be cloud native. Effectively, going cloud native creates new vendor lock-in issues.
• You need to keep up with the cloud. You give up some control over your architecture when you go cloud native. When the underlying cloud changes, you need to make changes to remain consistent and continue to get the benefits.
• You may not benefit from going cloud native. It can be hard to estimate the benefits you’ll get from going cloud native, and there’s no guarantee you’ll actually get the benefits you think you will.
None of these potential drawbacks means you shouldn’t go cloud native; it just means you need to carefully consider the option. You may decide it’s more advantageous to simply lift and shift so you can start getting cloud’s benefits sooner—there are plenty of benefits from cloud even if you aren’t cloud native.
VAST IT Services can help you think through these and other considerations as you plan your cloud adoption and migration strategy. With expertise in all the leading cloud providers, our team can advise on cloud selection, design your cloud architecture, execute your migration, and provide managed services to ensure your cloud delivers the performance your business requires. Contact us to learn more about making the right cloud decision and getting the best cloud results.
