If an organization wishes to migrate to the cloud what things need to be taken into consideration before such move takes place?
Besides obvious cost-savings the most influential factor for enterprises in deciding to move or not to move to cloud is improving productivity by enabling to leverage and enrich data by creating, sharing, accessing and co-editing it anywhere, with any device. You need to include productivity assessment into the business case calculation.
Apart from cost-savings and productivity, the most influential factors for enterprises in deciding to move or not to move to cloud are:
1. Technical considerations related to specific technology challenges that cloud may arise
2. External business considerations related to dealing with third party cloud providers
3. Internal business considerations related to potential non-technology impacts upon the business caused by the move to the cloud
Horizontal scalability with the given load at any time, in my opinion.
Certainly all of the answers above describe opportunities for cloud computing. In considering what a given organization might best adopt as a strategy, all of these in the context of that organization's particular situation will need to be considered. It is never an all-or-nothing decision and starting with the most eligible functions or applications will likely produce good results.
One of the most important opportunities for cloud adoption is systems development. Most organizations slow down development projects because of cumbersome hardware and software acquisition and security policies. Utilization of the cloud for development can eliminate these and provide an acceleration of development efforts. This isn't a free ride, of course. Code promotion, for example, can become more difficult. On balance, however, starting with systems development can provide quick returns and add pace to the process.
"what things need to be taken into consideration" - as plain as it looks: the needs and expectations of the users; and the painpoints of the current set-up.
As other commenters pointed out, you expect cost savings and you may want to speed up things (like setting up new research projects). But is moving from physical to virtual hardware to easily provide a server for a project sufficient? Do you want self-service? Do you want better monitoring of resources to pay-for-use? Do you have admin staff who are knowledgable and enthusiastic enough to migrate? Do you have any security issues (as we have in healthcare)? Can your services be consolidated (consider not only IaaS, but also PaaS and SaaS). So it is not only about taking single aspects into consideration, but shaping a vision af service provicion to your people.
Hi Ali,
Move / not move to which cloud types e.g. private, public, community clouds, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, XaaS etc also can be a separate discussion.
Generally some of the factors for consideration to move / not to move to cloud include:
1) Security - e.g. confidentiality, encryption, proprietary authentication, authorization, accounting etc.
2) Regulatory - e.g. some government regulations / policies might not encourage to move to cloud
3) Cost Savings - as mentioned by some scholar in previous posts
4) Apps Readiness - whether the critical apps can function in cloud mode e.g. on certain certified hypervisor, guest OS and the vendor is willing to support,
5) Service Availability - e.g. some public clouds might not have the required high availability / SLA expected even though is cost justified
6) Workload Variability - e.g. apps that have unpredictable peak / spikes are good candidate for moving to cloud (because elasticity is one key feature of cloud), if an app's workload is predictable or having low variability might not justified for cloud
7) Infrastructure Compatibility - e.g. some vendor licensing model might restrict their apps move to cloud, hardware dependency, legacy OS etc.
8) Internet Suitability - e.g. bandwidth, latency, certain Internet protocols might discourage some apps moving to cloud
9) Architecture Feasibility - this include scale up / out, parallel processing etc capabilities
10) Intranet Integration - some apps can move to cloud, but due to their required integration with other key / critical apps, they are decided / better not move to cloud by management
Regards,
Fung
Cloud is good only if it is hosted in the same country by government organization. It will be risky business if we move the data from one country to another. Moreover each country have their own rules regarding privacy of data.
Encryption is not an answer for the security of data since we all know that NSA might have put a backdoor in RSA encryption.
Privacy of data will change a lot if your data moves from American server to a server residing in Netherland
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