Cloud computing and hosting may offer a variety of distinct advantages, yet businesses planning to migrate must evaluate the technology and take a decision accordingly. Not all businesses would need a Cloud computing architecture to run their business.
Cloud is indeed considered to be the future of computing and offers a promising platform for enterprises. Despite this fact, it isn’t necessarily a technology that’s required/suitable for all. An evaluation of your application requirements can be compared with the features offered with this platform.
Before migration, you must understand the basic differences between the variety of cloud services offered across the industry.
Careful evaluations based on your business and the appropriate cloud model should be carried out at the initial stage. Don’t be tempted to use a particular solution only because your competitor has chosen it.
Following are FIVE of the most Crucial Considerations Before Migrating Over to a Cloud :-
Evaluate Prior to Taking Actions Businesses and its concerned officials face a constant pressure from business to speed time-to-market its critical applications and racing towards achieving the targets with shrinking budgets and team strengths.
In such cases, cloud hosting can seem to an attractive alternative to achieve multiple targets simultaneously. But, it is necessary to evaluate the IT requirements within your organisations and comparing it with the features offered with different cloud models that’s best suitable to your business.
Simply choosing a cloud model for the sake of doing so wouldn’t help you achieve an optimum performance, nor would it help with cutting down the costs and expenditures. For example, you cannot migrate your business over to a Private Cloud when your business demands it to be migrated to a Public Cloud Hosting platform.
The purpose and functionality of both the models are different hence there is no way to align your needs with it. Moreover, Clouds based on open-source hypervisors may offer different features than a VMware hosting platform. Therefore, careful evaluations must form an important part of your business IT strategy.
Here are some considerations to keep in mind:
Following are certain pointers to consider when choosing an appropriate Cloud for your business :-
Evaluating the Performance It is important to anticipate the performance of your application when hosted on a particular cloud infrastructure. For that purpose, you must consider the two things differently i.e. Hardware specs and Network Connectivity.
You might even ask the provider for a trial period to try and test the performance of the application over a particular infrastructure. Most of the companies now-a-days even offer a 30 days money-back guarantee, this gives you an opportunity to test the server, network and performance of your application over the infrastructure for 30 days.
Based on the results you may either choose to continue using the particular infrastructure or switch to something else.
Availability It is equally important for you to evaluate the requirements of availability and the downtime that is acceptable for your business. Though the architecture of a cloud is such that it usually wouldn’t go down. Yet, it is advisable to check the SLA’s laiden by the providers.
You may even try to ask for the architecture used for a particular cloud cluster to anticipate the possibilities, though its also true that not all providers wouldn’t usually disclose their network architecture , yet its worth giving a try.
Assuming the choice of a particular Cloud to be Best Appropriate Many a times, organisations often go into a passive state after choosing a solution. They tend to overlook the possibility of a situation wherein the chosen technology/platform might fail to suffice the business needs.
Therefore, it’s necessary to have a backup plan in place that can tackle the unexpected failures but causes no harm to the operations. You may seek help from the hosting provider with preparation of such a plan.
Thinking of the Best and Preparing for the Worst – Despite cloud being a buzzword today, it might not be the same always. There’s even a possibility wherein the cloud would no longer be suitable for your application needs and be replaced by a better technology in the future.
In that case you’d have to plan switching over to a more dedicated environment and something which you can do without taking much efforts. Or an hybrid kind of platform wherein an equilibrium of affordability, security and performance can be achieved.
Often times, managing a large IT infrastructure can be tedious and a costly affair, and outsourcing certain business processes can prove to be a viable and cost effective solution.
Zero Assumptions, Only Facts and Figures It can at-times cost you heavy losses if a decisions are taken based only on assumptions with the facts overlooked. Not all applications and tools are suitable to be run on a Cloud. Moreover, if its heavily customized, you must make sure that you get into its every minute details such as its back-end architecture, database, synchronization with other apps etc.
One must try to figure out how a particular Cloud architecture can support the application functions effectively. It is logical not to compromise or make assumptions based on floating information.
Partial Utilization of the Features that comes with Cloud Despite the complexities explained above, the cloud still offers tremendous opportunities for business growth and continuity. Research and finding the best possible ways of extracting maximum benefits from this technology is sure possible with Cloud.
But unless the emerging platforms are well tested, it’d be hard to do so. Apart from this, restricting yourselves from trying and testing it out for suitability and whether it can lead you to success path, might throw you far behind in the competition.
The most crucial and important feature of Cloud, is its on-the-fly scalability. The failure to leverage this feature is as good as hosting your business on a traditional hosting platform. It has been observed that users restrict the CPU and other resources to a certain threshold value, therefore during peak hours when the site demands more resources attimes, due to the set restrictions, applications often starve of resources.
It is important to evaluate such requirements and choose a threshold which is equal to the Actual Requirements + Buffer Resources. The pay-per-use cloud model, eliminates the need for any costly investment for a usually under utilized IT infrastructure.
The technology of Cloud is a promising evolution experienced by the IT Industry. Features such as instant scalability, redundancy, uptime, cost efficiency, flexibility etc. offers an exceptional future for your business.
This has eliminated the need for businesses to invest in costly hardware infrastructures. Moreover, pay-per-use acts as a topping on the icing, as you’d only pay for those resources that your business has actually used.
