Is your company considering moving some or many of their day-to-day operations to cloud servers? These days it is no longer really a question of if you will move at least part of your business enterprise to the cloud, but when. If this is a step you are contemplating soon, you might want to consider a couple of key questions that will help you to decide what elements in your groundwork may prevent your business from utilizing virtual servers or cloud hosting.
Will It Meet Your Financial Objectives?
Every project has both long term and short term risks for its financial return on investment. Have you looked at both of these to assess how including cloud servers will affect your goals? There are a number of factors to consider when looking at risk probability including utilization, speed, scalability and value. While it is true that these factors can and often will be built into most ROI models, careful consideration should be made to ensure you are aware of how including virtual servers or cloud hosting will affect the headline numbers for investment, revenue, cost and most importantly how long before you see your return.
Does the Solution Fit in the Enterprise Culture?
This is an important question that isn’t always asked at the beginning. The best solution is to start with an executive vision that clearly shows the direction the business transformation will take. Of course, this is easier said than done. It will require top-level support for the changes proposed, a clear roadmap for procurement, cloud services or cloud hosting and applications implementation and most of all the organization of stakeholders. You will need to develop consensus amongst these stakeholders for such elements as storage, computing, network and applications in order to prioritize demands for usage. If you begin by creating a series of pilot introductions you can build confidence amongst the users and create buy-in from your most critical stakeholders.
Can You Integrate Cloud Solutions and Current Services?
If you are considering several different cloud solutions as part of a bigger solution, do these various elements integrate and can they work well with the existing system in addition to each other? This can be a critical factor since the inability to integrate an element such as cloud VPS servers into the current system may make the changes impossible to implement. The three key elements to include are taking into account the interface conversion cost, assessing the difficulty level in changing the existing system and considering whether the skills exist within the company to make these changes.
The question of skills is an important risk as you will need to know if the current skill sets include an ability to assemble and customize multiple cloud servers and services from various providers. This will need to be accomplished in a flexible way that is adaptable while able to maintain the same high levels of security, handle backup and all governance issues that may arise. If you do not have this kind of skill in house, the cost of adding it needs to be considered as part of the solution.
Will your Legal, Contractual and Moral Obligations be Impacted?
Noncompliance can become an issue when considering an outside cloud service provider for cloud hosting or cloud VPS servers. Even the provision of contracts may not be sufficient when it comes to confidentiality and location assurances. In some instances you may even discover that force majeure will stop the supplier from honoring those agreements. A good example of this would be if a legal action resulted in a subpoena of another tenant’s data that is in the same system. This may have an impact on the enterprise’s corporate reputation.
Is the System Quality and Security Adequate to Meet Your Users’ Needs?
If you were buying a system in-house, you would have benchmarks it needed to meet. The same criteria holds true for anything in the cloud. You can assess the quality of an external system using the same factors you would use for the quality of your own system. In addition, take a close look at the provider’s track record just as you would with any other vendor. The same rules should be applied to security. Ask questions, get answers and adapt your traditional security models to the new cloud computing needs. Be sure that you include end-to-end security as part of the solution. Your own internal policies regarding user provisioning and control over access should be a part of the entire security plan.
As you can see, none of these questions are a large departure from what you would be asking if you were considering a new system in the traditional mode. Deciding to include cloud servers or cloud hosting as part of a larger project simply requires a few more questions that in the long run will give planning stages more information, ultimately ending with a better designed solution.
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