I’ve seen successful public (infrastructure) cloud deployments… but also spectacular failures. The difference between the two usually comes down to whether the team deploying into a public cloud environment realizes they’re dealing with an unfamiliar environment and acts accordingly.

Please note that I’m not talking about organizations migrating their email to Office 365. While that counts as public cloud deployment when an industry analyst tries to paint a rosy picture of public cloud acceptance, I’m more interested in organizations using compute, storage, security and networking public cloud infrastructure.

Let’s be realistic: as I already told you in one of the previous emails, public cloud differs from enterprise networking and server virtualization. You might transport your virtual machines into a public cloud unmodified (and pay more than it would cost you to run them locally), or rearchitect your applications to make the best use of innovative services offered by public cloud providers, but whatever you do learn to crawl before you start running in a marathon.

I’m positive there’s a non-critical application within your organization that is not tightly coupled with corporate databases (static web site is a nice example), and is thus an ideal candidate for your first cloud deployment. Use that application to figure out how to deploy and operate public cloud workloads, and try to learn to do things right. For example, implement decent network security, master hybrid cloud connectivity, and use infrastructure-as-code tools to manage the deployment.

While we won’t cover the application aspects in our Networking in Public Cloud Deployments online course, we’ll touch on compute and storage infrastructure, and give you more than enough details on public cloud networking, network security, and hybrid cloud connectivity to make you prepared for your first public cloud deployment… all you need to do is to register for the course.