Key Factors to Consider When Moving to Cloud

Cloud computing offers various benefits to businesses like efficiency, economy and scalability that allows them to perform business functions quickly and efficiently. As Cloud computing services are available to everyone regardless of their size and type, businesses are increasingly attracted to adopt it as a way to streamline their business processes and become more competitive. You should always get help from Managed IT service provider  to get your business evaluated for your readiness to adopt cloud services.

This is a huge step forward, businesses should not rush to adopt cloud computing without proper planning and evaluation.  

The number of Small businesses using Cloud computing in the USA is expected to increase from 39% to 85% in next five years.

Here are few things to consider before moving forward with cloud computing.

1. Cost and Return on Investment (ROI).

A well-planned move to the cloud should always be based on the cost of migration that should include provider fees over the time of first three years. However, you must first have a look at your own infrastructure because sometimes you can squeeze careful life augmentation or third party warranties helping you significant decrease in costs while allowing your business for better future planning and preparation for migration.

2. Business Impact Analysis.  

You must conduct a business impact analysis of the application, if not the whole infrastructure to evaluate how this migration will affect your business.  It will not be advisable to start with an application on which your business is highly dependent. You must plan moving workload get to experience first by putting the less critical business application on cloud first. For example, email servers, intranets, and departmental applications can be the first to go on the cloud.

3. Production versus development and test.  

You should start with less critical development and test environment first. Keep your configuration and infrastructure that you use with your production same while moving to cloud, to minimize the chances of problems and issues for you.

4. Performance matters.

You must not consider moving environment that needs extensive data processing or application that are highly performance sensitive. It is because in the case of a problem with these requests like increased response time will result in loss of business for you.

5. Complexity.

You must avoid starting with moving complex architecture systems with multiple and number of points requiring integration between different applications.  

6. Licensing.

You must evaluate vendor`s cloud model and evaluate if it will be costly to change from this dedicated model in future. Licensing and user terms and conditions may differ from vendor to vendor and cloud service provider. Therefore, you must always see whether vendor allows you to run additional copies in case of an event, within the same license or not?

7. Service level Agreements.

You must evaluate service level agreement (SLA) to understand what your service provider`s responsibilities, for example uptime, redundancy, and restoration. Some vendors may have typical SLAs. That`s why if you service level agreement is too challenging then cloud vendor may not agree to support it.  

8. Security.  

Security is an important factor that should be your high priority which choosing cloud vendor, before moving to the cloud you must verify if cloud service provider has adequate security measures in place. In addition to that, is there any regulation or data security related constraints that cloud service provider should support.

9. Future Migration Needs.

Consider what will happen if you want to move your environment to somewhere else with new cloud server provider at a later stage. Migrating from one cloud environment to another is not straightforward as moving physical office.

10. Internet Bandwidth and Reliability.

One of the most Important but most overlooked aspects of cloud migration is internet bandwidth requirements and service reliability. It is important because if your IT infrastructure will be moved to the cloud then you will become entirely dependent on your cloud service provider. That means reliability of cloud service provider is very important for you. You must consider a number of your company users, nature of work, your location to evaluate service provider. You must ask your Cloud service provider about availability and bandwidth requirements to access service.

Remember ,

You must note cloud can be simple not always a piece of cake. Migration without proper preparation and planning can be disastrous for your business. However with the help of reliable Managed IT service provider  and migration partner seamless migration is possible.