By Gaven Henry, Head of Infrastructure, Leo Tech Services Pte Ltd
Businesses are jumping on the Cloud bandwagon with the belief that it is “the” solution to remain competitive, through saving costs and boosting efficiency, in the market. Shifting legacy IT services to Cloud can no doubt present businesses with financial and operational benefits. However, a comprehensive understanding of Cloud and how to leverage the technology is necessary to prevent your Cloud strategy from backfiring, in turn hindering business operations.
A three-step guide to optimising your Cloud strategy begins with evaluating your existing business operations. Next, you need to understand the Cloud and its limitations. Finally, you should plan ahead to leverage the components that can provide value for your business.
Step 1: Understanding the Cloud and how can it help
The Cloud is essentially a layer of abstraction over the top of traditional IT resources like servers, storage space, databases, email and so forth. It allows another Cloud provider to manage all underlying complexities of the physical infrastructure in a remote location so businesses do not need to deal with physical requirements such as power and environmental considerations. It lifts the financial burden off the maintenance of physical assets and warranties, saving upfront on capital expenditure.
With Cloud adoption, bulk of the savings comes from doing away with unnecessary costs of employing specialised and highly skilled IT staff to maintain underlying systems and technologies.
The Cloud substracts IT complexities and can be managed by a single network administrator via a web based interface where one can just point and click to have a new server available for a project.
On top of operational benefits, Cloud stretches your dollar as it solves the problem of demand spikes which would require additional computing resources for brief periods of time. The technology allows flexibility as organisations only pay for what they use, and can easily add far greater resources for a few days over a peak period without having to maintain that level of commitment during quieter periods.
Step 2: To identify and overcome the limitations of the Cloud
Adopting Cloud as a technology solution is promising. However, there are limitations that need to be considered before committing to the big move to Cloud. An immediate implication of shifting legacy IT services from a physical equipment onsite to Cloud introduces a significant dependency on Internet connectivity.
For example, if your business assets, such as emails and shared file storage, are in the Cloud, a loss of Internet connection would mean that your business would be offline and unable to function. A possible solution would be to add some network complexity to ensure sufficient redundancy for all connectivity. Keep a (perhaps partial) local copy. Apart from such simple failure scenarios, organisations will also need to consider the bandwidth and latency implications of moving services offsite.
Even with a very fast (1 gigabit symmetrical) internet connection, opening medium to large files from shared storage will become noticeably slower for users, and may potentially lead to very long start up times and a loss of employee productivity during peaks in usage.
It is clear that not all workloads fit well with a basic Cloud migration strategy. Upfront savings could easily be eroded by long-term productivity loss. In some cases, it may not even be viable to adopt the Cloud due to the necessary requirement for physical connectivity to onsite devices such as printers, and robotic automation such as warehouse retrieval systems.
This is where planning and understanding your business is key to a successful Cloud strategy. There are a significant number of companies that will help shift an organisation’s existing services onto a Cloud provider for a fee. However, far fewer will take the time to evaluate your business, assess its risks and benefits, and help plan an effective strategy to leverage the best mix of Cloud and traditional technologies that will meet your business needs.
The key here is to work with a partner that won’t just help leverage “the Cloud” but instead, help leverage cloud technologies in the best way possible for your business.
Step 3: Plan ahead
Onsite and private cloud solutions are the natural next step beyond the basic Cloud model. Organisations can leverage exactly the same cloud technologies and automation solutions and realise the same benefits with far lower risk by replacing traditional IT infrastructure with their own onsite Cloud, and linking this securely with public cloud resources – this way, organisations stand to gain the flexibility of adding capacity on-demand during peak periods.
This is the fundamental difference between “using the Cloud” and “using Cloud technologies”. Whilst the former refers to buying a solution off the rack and hoping that it’s close enough, the latter focuses on taking the best materials and skills available, and tailoring a solution that fits your business requirements perfectly.
