Ahmed Taha is an Integration Architect with 15 years of hands-on experience in Microsoft technologies. BizTalk SME, and Azure Architect. He helps organizations with their cloud architectures, solution modernization, and integration architectures. Ahmed also likes to blog about exciting topics in the integration space and is an avid reader.
Organizations tend to move to the Cloud at the end of the day, and there are two main pillars: cost savings and competitive advantage that motivate organizations to move on to the Cloud. Mainly the cost savings for some who are not yet engaged in the Cloud and don’t know anything about it; they are looking to reduce the numbers. Unfortunately, there are a lot of organizations that treat IT departments as cost centers. It’s good to go to cost savings from a business perspective, but you should reap the benefits of the full potential of the Cloud. It makes a difference between an incredible organization with a lot of edge over another.
The competitive advantage is a vast umbrella. Of course, competitive advantage can manifest in different things, such as time to market. It means that the tools you’re using provide productivity gains to your team. Another part of the competitive advantage is unprecedented, which is a bit scary. It is an unparalleled set of tools that you have at your disposal now, for example, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and Big Data, all these services that you will not be able to build in a traditional environment or on-premises earlier. But I need not be an expert to consume it nowadays. All this kind of visibility and unprecedented reach and accessibility makes a competitive advantage the second pillar in the Azure benefits for organizations
The key considerations would be ensuring that all the key functional and non-functional requirements are met by the cloud provider you have for your solution. Of course, one of the key considerations as well would be like, security and compliance requirements. Some industries, like the financial sector, have strict regulations and compliance requirements. Another thing would be monitoring; you must monitor all the non-functional and operational aspects. The last one to consider is the SLA of the platform in terms of performance and terms of availability. All these parameters must be considered when you’re about to move to the Cloud.
Ahmed has recommended two books, and one is the Azure cloud-native architecture map book, written by Stephen Eyskens. This book was published in Feb 2021, so it’s relatively recent. The second book is Azure SQL, revealed by Bob Ward. This book was published in October 2020.
Azure Cloud Native Architecture Mapbook (Stephane Eyskens, Ed Price)