Cloud Services – A Decision Maker’s Guide
This blog outlines some of the considerations in cloud
deployment to help practitioners make business-beneficial choices.
The first matter to be addressed is to define the problem
you are trying to solve and articulate your goals. Some goals that relate to
Cloud deployment decisions include:
·
Rapid short term or long term capacity
provisioning
·
Creating intermediate to long term
infrastructure capacity flexibility
·
Infrastructure modernization/enhancement
·
Deployment of integrated applications and
infrastructure, such as a salesforce.com deployment
·
Managing/minimizing capital requirements
And the list goes on – it is limited only by your
creativity.
No matter what your
goals are, there are several factors that should be taken into account in the
decision process. Among them are the following:
·
Security
·
Cost
·
Transition both to and from the Cloud platform
·
Are the savings real?
·
Lifespan
·
User considerations
Security is a
significant factor. Your data will be stored outside of your environment if you
opt for a public cloud solution. Where is the data stored? How is backup
managed? How accessible is it to your user community? What safeguards are in
place to ensure that it is protected from mal-use?
Cloud vendors will tell you that their environments are
secure and protected. Understanding the details is critical – you cannot let
security be compromised and hence a detailed understanding of where data is
stored, how it is backed up, how access is protected and how authorities are to
be managed are critical questions in selecting a solution. In the case of a
private cloud deployment, the same questions apply, although external access is
more secure due to your corporate firewall deployment.
Cost
Art Wittmann, writing for Information Week recently, noted
that cloud costs tend to be decreasing and contracts for cloud services should
include that as a consideration. Moore’s law has continually lowered the cost
of storage and therefore by implication, the cost of cloud services. Any
agreement with a cloud provider would need to include price protection – not
only from increases, but also guaranteeing that you benefit from decreases in
provider cost and therefore market price of newly contracted cloud services. A
favored nation clause can help here, but it is often difficult to quantify and
to administer.
Transition
Moving to a cloud solution will incur some cost and effort.
Is that well understood? Are the resources in place – either on staff or contracted
– to effect the transition seamlessly?
The analysis of any technology deployment should include all costs and
benefits. Moving of any application or data to a cloud provider will incur some
costs. That is clear. Equally clear, the costs of moving the application and/or
data back to the internal environment – as certainly would be the case in a
short term capacity enhancement – should be well understood. What is the
process and what are its requirements and costs? Will there be a period where your
application or data may not be available for users? What are the consequences
of this, and what is a mitigation strategy? There is no need for granular
disengagement planning at the point of engagement of a cloud provider, but an
understanding of the process and costs of disengagement will inform decision
making.
Realization of
Savings
In any analysis of change, it is critical to ensure that
savings forecasted will be realized. What will become of un-depreciated current
storage investment if you migrate to a cloud environment and the current
equipment is no longer of use to the business? Will you save labor by
migrating? What will happen to those employees whose work will be displaced?
Will their capacity be absorbed in departmental overhead? Will they be reassigned
to work that would be funded independent of the cloud decision? You get the
idea… So often ‘savings’ are defined at the cost study level but no operational
plans are in place to realize the savings. The caution – make sure forecasted
savings are realized and that someone is accountable for their realization.
Lifespan
As all IT professionals have learned, there is no ‘final
solution’ to a challenge. Technology evolves and so do solution options. Hence
the Cloud is a current advantageous tool, and it will be replaced at some point
in time by something bigger and better. This has always been the case in IT,
and I project that will continue to be true in the future.
For that reason, careful consideration of solution lifespan
is important. You will be investing some resources to move to a Cloud solution.
That investment will have a lifespan – the consideration of full lifecycle
costs is a necessary ingredient to any economic analysis.
I am not suggesting that when a new technology emerges, you
will necessarily move to it. Instead, I am merely suggesting that you consider
the likely lifespan of the Cloud solution you are considering – it will yield
insights as to the economic advantage of the steps you are considering now.
User considerations
Any actions by IT need to be driven by the best interests of
the business. Careful consideration of user impacts, both benefits and
challenges alike, is essential.
In Summary
The bottom line is this – Cloud options offer the potential
to create business value – potential cost reductions, deployment speed
improvements, capacity enhancement, modernization of infrastructure, user
flexibility, etc. This is a valuable tool whose benefits and costs should be
assessed in a balanced way.
Bob Kotch
