Five Things To Consider Before Moving Into The Cloud

The cloud may appear like the promised land for those who are new to the technology. But while the benefits it can deliver are not to be doubted, the road to a successful cloud project is not without its challenges. In this post, we look at the main considerations you need to make when preparing to move part of your IT environment into the cloud.

Cloud computing presents countless opportunities to many organisations. At the same time, moving to the cloud offers up a plethora of challenges and obstacles that must be overcome before the benefits can be realised.

Despite the cloud ultimately being an exercise in outsourcing, it is essential that any organisation adopting cloud services takes stock of everything they have in-house to make sure they create a holistic portfolio of the infrastructure underpinning their IT environments, as well as the full stack beyond it.

Prepare to fail

‘Fail to prepare and prepare to fail’ is how the trusty adage goes. Indeed, jumping into the cloud without taking due diligence in a number of areas could see an organisation stumble at the first hurdle.

Therefore, let’s look at five of the most important things to consider when moving to the cloud in order to make sure your project is a success.

1. On or off premise. When moving to the cloud, most companies are always going to keep some of their IT infrastructure hosted on-premise. Furthermore, an important decision will be which applications and which data you entrust to the cloud and which you keep in-house.

Fears over security or outages, as will be outlined, will often lead people to believe that anything remotely important should not be put into the cloud. In reality, cloud providers – the specialists – are more than capable of keeping your IT environment up, running and secure. It will ultimately be a question of which things would run more reliably, faster, be more accessible or would save money if they were hosted in the cloud.

Cheaper storage options mean that keeping large swathes of your data in a supplier’s data warehouse might be the best option, as long as legal issues around protection and location are addressed. Moreover, the ability to utilise platform, software or desktop as a service will enable the employee flexibility and efficiency benefits everyone hears so much about. It is a question of having a complete understanding of your own IT environment and your business needs and then acting accordingly.

2. Legacy applications. One of the main stumbling blocks, particularly for larger organisations, when preparing to move to the cloud is the trouble of not knowing what to do with your legacy applications. The old systems which formulate the basis of an existing, in-house IT environment are obviously an integral part of how a company functions, whether that’s software or policy.

How you migrate these to the cloud, or indeed how you incorporate a cloud solution around these legacy applications will be one of the critical decision you will have to make. It will be part of the broader challenge of deciding what parts of your IT environment should stay on premise and what can and should move to the cloud as already mentioned. Any interoperability that you need to have between new and old applications should be a key concern.

3. Security. Always at the top of people’s list of concerns, it goes without saying that it is of paramount importance that that the move to the cloud does not compromise the security of your IT environment. The checklist is not that short either; it includes educating staff, rewriting applications and considering your firewall options carefully. In the end, you will be rewarded for your efforts. A recent Microsoft study has found that 35 percent of small and medium-sized businesses have found higher levels of security with cloud computing.

Know your own IT

4. Technical requirements. Needless to say, you won’t get far if you prepare to move to the cloud without knowing exactly what technical boxes need to be ticked. Compute power, uptime guarantees, connection speed, data retrieval time and storage scalability are just a mere few on the list of considerations you need to make. In essence, these will be the things that from a performance perspective will have made the cloud so appealing. But without a clear idea of exactly what it is that you have to have, you could jump into a solution that doesn’t satisfy the needs of your organisation.

Fortunately, the ability to trial many cloud services and the pay-as-you-use pricing model alleviates any big financial risks, but this is no reason to go running blind down an alley without first making sure you understand your own in-house requirements. Take stick of all of your business plans over the coming year and look at what the associated loads on your websites and other IT infrastructure will be. Don’t forget to factor in peaks that result from marketing campaigns.

5. Choosing the right supplier. The list of technical issues will naturally narrow the number of suitable suppliers available to you in the market. But in an ever-widening marketplace of cloud suppliers, there are still going to be a myriad of options to choose from. Assuming they can provide everything you need (as listed in numbers 1-3), there are other considerations to make, such as cost.

Often more important, though, is the ‘cultural fit’ of their company and yours. Do they provide an attractive range of support services? Do they have a similar ethos to you, maybe around “green” issues? Are they accommodating and understanding of your needs? Can you bear having to sit around a table with them to talk shop? If the answer to the above questions is predominantly ‘no’, then the chances are that you should look elsewhere. Your cloud provider is going to be an important part of your organisation, someone you will trust with important data, applications and processes, so ensuring a technical and cultural fit is essential.

The advice that rings true throughout all of these considerations is that you must know your IT environment inside out before moving any applications, data hosting or infrastructure to the cloud. From the data you store to the software you use, not to forget all the skeletons potentially lurking in your IT closet, you cannot start a journey into the cloud before a full in-house audit is complete.

Dominic Pollard is editor at The Cloud Circle, where this article first appeared.

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