Ten tips on Cloud Computing

Confused about cloud computing? You’re not alone. An April 2011 study by Norwich University reported almost a third of respondents expressed a moderate or greater level of confusion about the issue. By working with The Missing Link, we can help you evaluate your options and plan a future strategy with cloud computing in mind, but you can improve the preparedness of your own organisation right now with these 10 tips:

1. Understand why you want to be in the cloud, what you want to achieve, and who will measure your success. Cloud computing can bring improved efficiencies in IT service delivery, governance and standardisation and move IT from a capital cost to an operating expense.
2. Analyse where the cloud best fits in your IT delivery. Apart from some web-delivered applications, almost all the interest in enterprise cloud development has been in private or managed private clouds. However, there’s growing momentum behind ‘cloud-sourcing’ from external providers, and it’s increasingly common for cloud implementations to require connection to other external IT services, which makes them ‘hybrid’ clouds.
3. Understand which of your workloads are cloud-ready (and which aren’t). Chances are, if your needs involve sensitive data, third party software which isn’t yet virtualised, or is regulation-intensive, now may not be the time to make the move. However, if you’re active in collaborative services, desktop services, development and testing or infrastructure storage, now is the time to start planning your strategy.
4. Know where and how you are going to realise the payback from your cloud investments. Clients who can serve themselves require less support, automated management reduces your labour costs, standardisation of workloads offers more opportunities for automation and virtualisation likely translates to lower capital costs.
5. Review your service lifecycle. You’ll need to re-engineer your approach to service design and service requests. First, focus on the re-engineering steps that take the longest and consider how you might automate workflows.
6. Standardisation is crucial. Remember Henry Ford’s motto — “You can have any colour you want as long as it’s black” and consider where you can apply that same thinking in your service delivery. Standardisation gets harder the higher up the technology stack you look but the rewards are correspondingly greater.
7. Plan now to mitigate cloud migration risk. Understand, deploy and test your plans for securing sensitive data and applications. Make sure you have appropriate controls on user access to corporate resources. Test your exposure to risk from failure of network components.
8. Consult us about your delivery model. The cloud potentially offers you consumption-based charging and dynamic provision/de-provision; a shift from ‘owning’ to ‘renting’ your infrastructure. You may need assistance thinking of your service delivery in this way.
9. Begin planning for new roles and competencies. A new paradigm needs a remodeled workforce and new skill sets for your team.
10.  Establish your cloud architecture and integrate it with your service delivery strategy.

Call us on 1300 865 865 to start planning for your cloud services or find out how we can help with existing plans.