What to consider when deciding whether to move to the Cloud
Migrating to the cloud can streamline business processes and offer an array of benefits including efficiency, economy and scalability. However, many organizations haven’t experienced the cost reductions, performance enhancements, reduced operational overhead and other benefits believed to be gained with a migration to cloud computing.
Before moving to the cloud, changes, complexities and budget need to be considered and an overall enterprise strategy is key. Migrating to the cloud without having a purpose-built plan will lead to significant cost overruns, resource misallocation issues and an extremely muddled IT environment.
Here’s what you should consider before migrating to Cloud
Security & Compliance
Security is one of the most important concerns for any business. It can be daunting to shift your valuable data on another company’s servers.
Although public cloud providers have some stringent security frameworks in place, you need to consider your firewall in the cloud, securing access for your remote workforce, data ownership and data security as well as the possibility for data repatriation (this is often overlooked).
Compliance is another important consideration for most enterprises. Depending on the regulations applicable to your business you might need to store certain data in a specific region, or some data may not be deployed to the cloud at all. Additionally you may be subject to insurance compliance requirements necessitating added layers of security for remote access and connectivity.
Back-up, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
To ensure business continuity, you should contemplate your disaster recovery strategy before embarking on your cloud migration. Proper cloud back-up and an effective backup strategy to mitigate against downtime or a disaster faced by your cloud provider is a key consideration. What is the recovery plan to get you out of the crisis? It is important that you have some knowledge of what constitutes an outage and when fiscal penalties should take effect.
Cost and ROI
One of the critical considerations around moving to cloud vs on-premise is the cost of running infrastructure – energy costs, hardware (servers and processing), software, human resources, fault tolerance and disaster recovery as well as the cost to ensure connectivity to the cloud systems for your staff.
One of the advantages of migrating to cloud services is that cloud technology is paid as an operating expenditure but in fact businesses then find that they need to invest in a capital expenditure to ensure security, DR, secure access etc as part of the initial investment.
Skills and Support
In most cases, internal IT departments don’t possess the skills to effectively monitor and maintain a cloud environment. Enterprises also need the support of an independent party to assess and verify the cloud environment. It is also advisable to use an autonomous Cloud Management Platform (CMP), to manage and optimize your cloud assets. This will allow you to keep a view about the costs incurred, identify usage patterns, and adjust your infrastructure to get the most optimal cloud performance.
Summary
Migrating to cloud is not a one-off decision. It has long-term and company-wide implications and therefore, the decision to move to cloud should not be made in isolation. Talk to us to assess your current infrastructure and provide a comprehensive migration roadmap along with the risks involved and make sure cloud is a sound choice for your business.