Cloud computing has been one of the most highly talked subjects within the IT environment during the past four years. Organizations, ranging from small to large enterprises are showing their interest to move their business to benefit through cloud. Moving the application to cloud offers benefits like less CAPEX, immediate ROI, reduced business risk, quick implementation etc.
While cloud computing will dramatically change the way an organization operates, one needs to exercise caution while deciding what, when and how to move to cloud. An extensive analysis of your application portfolio will ensure that the organization doesn’t make big mistakes that will potentially push the organization years behind in reaping the benefits of cloud.
| App Characteristics | Yes | No |
| Is the application mission critical and will any outage lead to major disruption of the business? | ||
| Is the application handling any sensitive data to control incident responses or any forensic investigations? | ||
| Is the application handling very important business processes that will potentially bring your operations to a halt? | ||
| Is the application running any big data which requires extremely low latency and extreme disk I/O requirements? | ||
| Is the application operating under stringent government data security requirements? | ||
| Is the technology used in the application NOT supported by the vendor? | ||
| Does your application require stringent SLAs and greater liability for data loss/theft/downtime etc? | ||
| Would your app architecture and technology used create vendor(infra service provider) lock-in? | ||
| Don’t you have the flexibility to move your app between different infra service providers? | ||
| Don’t you have the business continuity plan and processes in place? |
If the answer to most of the above questions is ‘YES’ then you need to wait for the right opportunity and not RUSH! It’s always best to adopt cloud with a very low risk app, data or business process to start with. Also, it would be better to setup a private cloud, so as to eliminate all your teething problems before moving to public cloud.
Take one safe step at a time instead of a giant leap. Happy cloud computing!