Moving to the cloud is about aligning expectations with realistic outcomes

Kent Christensen, Datalink's Virtualization practice manager, spoke to me recently and offered some tips for any companies thinking about moving to the cloud.

Datalink provides datacenter services and solutions for mid-sized to enterprise organizations and consults, designs, integrates, implements, and supports and manages solutions from leading manufacturers like Cisco, EMC, NetApp, VMware and others. This encompasses both private cloud solutions and public/hybrid cloud solutions.

BN: What are the key benefits of moving a business to the cloud?

KC: There are general expectations for cloud computing, such as much better agility, a more elastic infrastructure, and service-oriented standardized services. However, the specific outcomes are generally aligned tightly to a specific business model. One may deliver their application via a cloud SaaS model and realize a higher level to service more quickly at reduced cost. Another may enable cloud to its organization leveraging new applications and access devices to transform a legacy retail operation into something that resembles an Apple Store.

BN: What are the common mistakes SMBs make when choosing a cloud service?

KC: The number one challenge is aligning expectations with realistic outcomes. SMBs need a real understanding of what services they are transforming and what services levels they want to obtain. When looking at public cloud to provide the services they need to understand how security, cost, management and specifically service levels will align to their organization¹s needs.

BN: How can a business identify the model that best fits its requirements?

KC: A general approach is to align the existing business, application by application, to a transformational model that includes the capabilities of cloud computing. An organization with existing operations may move some things to an external cloud while adopting cloud principals to internal existing operations. This is a transformational migration from existing state to a new way of delivering applications. Rarely does this happen in bulk form for an existing organization.

BN: What are the tricks to keeping costs down?

KC: The key is defining a business outcome for an application and aligning requirements to the available solutions. If a cloud provider has an application like payroll or messaging that applies to many businesses, that will often be less costly than buying and managing that internally. However, in many cases a strategic application running in a corporate data center may be more efficient to apply cloud-like attributes internally vs. outsourcing to a cloud provider.

BN: Who can legally access business data in the cloud?

KC: Security and compliance in a cloud model is really quite diverse and as a result a very ‘cloudy’ area to generalize. Each industry, including government, has different levels of compliance requirements for different types of data. In a generalization, highly regulated industries (medical, financial) and organizations with highly sensitive data requirements, do not leverage public cloud for those needs today.

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