To cloud or not to cloud
Any cloud implementation methodology requires that you make decisions about which applications you want to move to the cloud and in what order. Very few organizations will be able to simply migrate everything all at once, so some prioritization has to take place. So, where do your begin?
Low-hanging fruit
Start with low-hanging fruit that has low impact on the organization. Find services that aren’t used often or that are used only lightly and may not be mission-critical. Move those first to help both you and your staff learn about the overall process and learn lessons that can be applied to more critical workloads. Through this process, you will learn about how the cloud provider supports your workloads so that you can make appropriate adjustments as you move on to the next wave of your application migration.
Consider SaaS
Wherever possible, migrate appropriate services to SaaS vendors. For example, if you’re an Exchange shop, consider a move to Office 365 or an equivalent. For many companies, it simply no longer makes sense to operate local collaboration environments. But, there are exceptions. If you’re running a heavily customized environment, make sure you do a feature-by-feature analysis to determine what you may lose and then decide if the company can live without that feature. If not, either find a workaround or stay local.
Likewise, you might consider replacing some of your local data analysis services with cloud-based ones. With the ability for many cloud-based reporting services to scale to almost unlimited capacity, you won’t have to worry about local compute and storage resources for something that is becoming more important all the time.
What should stay local
Finally, your cloud implementation strategy must account for those applications that need to stay in the local environment. Infrastructure support services, such as DNS, DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol)and print servers, really need to stay local, and you will need to keep at least one or two domain controllers local for authentication purposes.
Beyond these basics, though, consider keeping applications that are particularly mission-critical, sensitive, or that are highly regulated in-house. Even if you can find a capable cloud provider, many prefer to keep such services under local control as a part of a risk management strategy. This too, however, is starting to change as cloud providers continue to deploy increasingly robust and secure environments. Over time, security, data locality and regulatory concerns related to cloud deployment will be a thing of the past.
About the author:
Scott Lowe is a former CIO and frequent contributor to TechTarget, TechRepublic and other IT publications. He is the founder and managing consultant of The 1610 Group. Follow him on Twitter @OtherScottLowe.