Cloud Audit: Effectively Determining Your Cloud Strategy

Cloud assessment or cloud audit is a crucial step in evaluating an organization's readiness to migrate to the cloud. During this audit, the resources, environment, and maturity of its information system are examined. This cloud assessment helps determine whether the organization is capable of migrating to the cloud and under what conditions. The cloud audit is essential for defining the organization's cloud strategy, considering its needs and specific environment. Therefore, we begin by studying the existing setup and understanding the objective of the cloud migration need.

What is cloud assessment?

Cloud audit or cloud assessment helps facilitate the migration to the cloud process and create a cloud environment that addresses business challenges and company needs. It defines the cloud strategy. During this cloud audit, we aim to evaluate various parameters.

Human resources at the heart of the cloud audit

This phase of the cloud assessment validates the availability and skills of internal resources to handle the cloud migration.
It is essential to understand the level of investment from internal teams, including their availability, skills, training levels, and business requirements (such as RTO, RPO).
It is also important to determine whether external support is necessary for the cloud migration, whether internal teams need upskilling, or whether recruiting experts is required. Finally, identifying low-value tasks that can be automated or minimized during the cloud migration helps better assess the impact of the migration on human resources.

Cloud assessment: The technical and technological aspect of existing infrastructures

We study the existing setup to regain control of the technological layers. This evaluation of the infrastructure’s condition helps reduce technical debt and identify obsolescence in certain parts of the infrastructure or low to nonexistent utilization of some machines.
We also aim to understand the interactions between different technical layers to avoid future slowdowns:

• Analyze dependencies and interactions,
• Connections between applications and services,
• The impact of modifying an application on others,
• Study opportunities to optimize interactions between workloads to improve performance and scalability.

Security during the cloud assessment

During this phase of the cloud audit, the sensitivity level of applications or data in relation to the organization's security policy is identified. This will help determine the cloud strategy and the need for a private cloud or sovereign cloud if not all data can be migrated to a public cloud.
The scope of this migration will also be evaluated, especially for sensitive applications, where it may be preferable to migrate the entire environment.

Cloud audit: What is the ROI for the cloud migration?

The cloud assessment covers a wide scope, including the return on investment (ROI) of migrating to the cloud. In some cases, during the audit of the existing infrastructure, it becomes apparent that it is possible to reduce the number of machines to be migrated by 10 to 20% because they are underutilized (also reducing the required machine power). This helps properly size the cloud project, optimize cloud pricing and cloud usage costs, and validate the ROI of the cloud project. However, the cloud migration is not always solely aimed at the financial ROI of the project.

Determine the migration objective during the cloud assessment

During any cloud audit, it is essential to understand the reasons pushing an organization to migrate to the cloud: modernization of infrastructure, securing databases, easy access to the cloud, setting up a DRP, etc. The objective will guide the recommendations following the cloud assessment.
The cloud audit helps define a roadmap for the next few years and set priorities. It also allows for the financial investment and time spent on the project to be spread out over time. At the end of a cloud audit, the organization will have a specification document and guidelines, ensuring that they are set up for success in their cloud migration, hybrid cloud, or multicloud project. This cloud assessment is a critical step to understanding how cloud infrastructures work and ensuring their efficiency and security. A thorough analysis of the infrastructure’s state helps reduce technical debt, optimize performance, and make informed decisions about the cloud migration. Discover how we’ve assisted our clients with their cloud audits in the airport industry and the insurance sector.

If you enjoyed this article, feel free to watch our webinar "How to prepare and manage your cloud project?" on the topic or check out our other articles about the cloud below.

Once this step is implemented, our experts will be able to advise you on setting up your Cloud Landing zone.