Solving your Cloud Headaches: Information is Power

In our last post we touched on the challenges that a CIO has in terms of making the CEO’s cloud dreams come true!  The benefits and advantages of cloud are, in all likelihood, exactly what the CIO wants anyway.

It’s just that getting from point A to point B can be a bit of a nightmare!

We suggested some questions in three areas, which might help make this transition a lot more headache-free! Be informed. Address Your skills and staffing. Understand and deal with your risk.

So, let’s drill down on how to become an informed customer.  It’s a great place to start if you are new to the cloud, looking to change clouds or trying to decide if you stay in-house or outsource.

If you are new to cloud, how do you know which cloud?

Cloud computing comes in three basic flavours – public clouds, private clouds and hybrid clouds.  Which one you go for really depends on the workloads, security and management required.

In a public cloud environment, resources such as servers and storage, are owned and operated off site by a third party – think Google or Microsoft.

This means:

1.       Potentially lower costs (it is becoming more and more common to hear people complain about bill fatigue in the public cloud arena so controlling costs is actually becoming more difficult)

2.       No maintenance – this is done by your cloud provider

3.       Unlimited scalability (but this will come at a cost)

4.       High reliability – generally speaking disaster recovery should be well covered as many cloud providers have to “pay back” for outages.

In a private cloud environment resources are owned and used exclusively by the organisation often on premises, but sometimes in a data-centre.

This means

1.       More flexibility as you can customise

2.       Improved security as resources are solely dedicated to your organisation

So for all intents and purposes there are advantages to both – enter our third flavour of cloud – the hybrid cloud, combining private clouds with public clouds and allowing data, applications and services to move between the two – kind of like getting a scoop of Rum N Raisin and Cookies N Cream – in the same cone!

Hybrid cloud gives you:

1.       Cost effectiveness, as you scale in and out of a public cloud only pay when you need the extra resources.

2.       Flexibility to allow you to scale up and down as required.

3.       Easy – a gradual transition to the cloud. No cloud brain-freeze from taking the whole lot at once or too fast!

4.       Control – keep sensitive assets secure.

How do you know which technology?

This is a complex question.  Been to an ice-creamery lately? It’s not just the flavour.. there’s all the other bits that get added to enhance your ice-cream experience.   But which ones go together best? And when did ice-cream get so complicated!

Alas, there is also a lot more than just choosing your flavour of cloud.

1.       What are your organisation’s needs? Having a cloud strategy that is integral to the business strategy is important.

2.       How is data used within your company?  As we discussed in the last post, data analytics is one of the great benefits of cloud. But you need to know what type of data it is, who needs access it, how does it integrate into your systems and how will it be secured.

3.       If you are working with consultants, you need to all be on the same page – are your definitions of cloud the same? Are your expectations of cloud what that partner would deliver?

4.       What is your cloud readiness?  You need to do a capability assessment.  We will discuss skills and staffing in a future post.

5.       What is your time frame for migration?  What apps can be migrated, legacy apps might cause issues?

How do you set your cloud strategy?