If you want to ensure a cloud migration that benefits your
business, avoid the most common mistakes.
The sun always shines above the clouds," say optimists.
What they do not mention is that under the clouds there are high winds,
torrential rain and lightning.
The same is true with cloud computing. On the sunny side,
the cloud offers a variety of benefits, including the promise of increased
reliability, flexibility, manageability and scalability. Look below, however,
and you'll see the dark side of technology - a place where a single mistake can
lead to a complete catastrophe.
If you want to ensure a cloud migration that benefits your
business, avoid the following common mistakes:
1. Migrate to the cloud without governance and planning
strategy
Provisioning infrastructure resources in the cloud is very
simple, and it is equally easy to lose sight of the policy, security, and cost
issues that may occur. Here governance and planning are essential.
"While governance and planning are the goals, they don't
need to be addressed all at once," says Chris Hansen, leader of cloud
infrastructure practice at technology consulting firm SPR Consulting. "Use
small iterations supported by automation. That way you can address the three
critical areas of governance - monitoring/management, security and finance -
to quickly solve problems and fix them."
A related mistake is not fully understanding who within the
organization is responsible for specific cloud-related tasks such as security,
data backups, and business continuity.
"When something goes wrong and these things have not
been discovered, companies can find themselves in a very difficult the situation," says Robert Wood, director of security at SourceClear, a
provider of security automation platform.
2. Believe that anything can be done in the cloud.
While much progress has been made in recent years, many
applications are not yet cloud-ready. An enterprise can seriously damage
application performance, user experience and engagement, and results if it
sends something to the cloud that is not fully ready or requires complex
integration with legacy systems, notes Joe Grover, a partner with LiquidHub.
"Take the time to understand what you plan to earn by
making this change [to the cloud] and then validate that you will get what you
want," he says.
3. Treat the cloud as your local data centre
One costly mistake many companies make is treating their
cloud environment as a local data centre. "If you follow this path, your
business will eventually focus on things like total cost of ownership (TCO)
analysis to make crucial migration decisions," explains Dennis Allio,
president of the cloud technology services group for Workstation. . While cloud
services can deliver significant cost savings, they also require a totally different
resource management process.
Consider, for example, migrating a single application server
from a data centre to the cloud.
"Proper analysis of TCO will take into account how many
hours in a day the server will be in use," says Allio. For some companies,
a server may only be used during business hours. In a data centre, leaving a
server on 24x7 adds only a slightly extra cost to the facility's utility bill.
But in the cloud, users usually pay by the hour. "Your cloud TCO analysis
is likely to assume eight hours a day of cloud usage - which can provide an
unwelcome surprise at a potentially triple cost if the cloud systems management the group does not include processes for shutting down these servers when it is
not. are in use, "he adds.
4. Believe Your Cloud Service Provider Will Take Care of
Everything
Top-tier cloud service providers (CSPs) provide all
customers, regardless of size, with operational capabilities equal to a Fortune
50 IT staff, says Jon-Michael C. Brook, author and consultant who currently
co-chairs Cloud Security Alliance Top Security Alliance.
However, based on the shared responsibility model, CSPs are
responsible only for what they can control, especially the service
infrastructure components. Many tasks, especially the deployment, maintenance
and enforcement of security measures, are left to the customer to provide and
manage.
"Take time to read best practices from the cloud you
are deploying, follow cloud design standards, and understand your
responsibilities," advises Brook. "Don't trust your cloud service
provider will take care of everything."
5. Suppose lift and shift is the only clear path to the cloud
migration
The cost advantages of the cloud can quickly evaporate when
poor strategic choices are made. A lift and shift cloud transition - simply
uploading images from internal systems within a CSP infrastructure - is
relatively easy to manage, but potentially inefficient and risky in the long
run.
"The lift and shift approach ignores scalability to
increase and decrease demand," says Brook. "There may be systems
within a design that is appropriate to be an exact copy, however, putting an
entire enterprise architecture directly onto a CSP would be costly and
inefficient. Invest the initial time to redesign your architecture for the
cloud and you will benefit greatly. "
6. Failed to monitor service performance
Failure to regularly evaluate cloud service to expectations
is a quick way to waste money and hamper critical business operations.
"An organization should periodically review key
performance indicators and take appropriate measures to address actual and
potential deviations from planned results," says Rhand Leal, information
security analyst at global consulting Adviser Expert Solutions.
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