Get your head out of the clouds:
Five points to consider as
you develop a cloud strategy
The buzz around the cloud is very real. It offers
considerable business agility, cost efficiencies
and service improvements to IT managers. What
the buzz doesn’t tell you is that getting to the
point where the cloud brings these benefits to
your organization isn’t easy. So the real question
becomes: What do you need to keep in mind
when integrating cloud computing into an IT
strategy?
According to Mike Martin, Senior Vice President,
Solutions & Services for Logicalis, a global IT
provider, the key to creating a winning strategy
is taking a thorough look at your infrastructure,
facilities and services—and defining their
adaptability to the cloud. And once you’ve done
that, you can seek a cloud provider who meets
your needs and deserves your trust. “It’s about
doing your due diligence,” says Martin, “instead
of just jumping in and choosing a provider.”1
Five key considerations
when developing a cloud strategy
1. Classify your applications to create business requirements.
The best place to start in the cloud journey is by first looking at your applications and classifying them.
Rank how your company uses them and evaluate their requirements, including:
■ Management requirements—Would offloading increase your ability to innovate instead of fight
fires? For instance, do you really want to be in the business of email management?
■ Business technicality—Can they be virtualized? If they can’t be virtualized, how can I support and
maintain them in the long term? What operating support do they have?
■ Mission criticality—What are my business-critical systems and the business continuity/disaster
recovery requirements (BC/DR) for those applications and ecosystems? For apps that aren’t on the
top tier of mission criticality, you can develop a lower cost model for outsourcing or hosting in a
co-lo environment, or even leave on-prem. For apps in the top tier, you’ll need a higher cost model.
Five key considerations cont. pg. 2
Hear more from our experts. View full content of
the video at www.us.logicalis.com/dcfast5.
Five key considerations when developing a cloud strategy,
2. Assess your fixed assets and your data center lifecycle.
Do you have fixed assets that you need to leverage to get as much value
as you can? Depending on where you are in your own on-premises data
center lifecycle, you can determine which assets are at a good spot in their
lifecycle to phase out or upgrade.
View any or all of these
titles at
www.us.logicalis.com/
dcfast5:
1. Data Center
Optimization and
Outsourcing for
Efficiency
2. Moving Strategic
Aspects of Your
Environment to a Cloud
Model
3. Strategies for SunSetting IT Equipment
4. Network Rationalization
5. Managed Services,
IT Automation and
Modular Computing
3. Thoroughly define your security needs.
One of the biggest hang-ups people have surrounding the cloud is security.
Will the data be safe? Will your services be there when needed? It’s
hard for anyone to answer these questions when you don’t know exactly
what kind of security you need for each service. The best practice is to
firmly establish security policies for each application. The policies then
become requirements as you seek a cloud provider and make other critical
decisions. You’ll want to know your provider’s security measures, as well—
in the data center itself, in the network and on the application level.
4. Don’t forget ITSM.
It’s easy to assume that moving things to the cloud alleviates the need
for an IT service management (ITSM) strategy—but, according to Martin,
that’s not true. “I really do believe,” he says, “that an ITSM strategy is part
and parcel with defining your cloud environment.” ITSM is about defining
policies and procedures around managing your infrastructure and data
center applications, both on-premises and off-site. It includes everything
from change management to asset and lifecycle management. It boils down
to having a defined process around IT delivery. It is important that you
define it internally and then find a cloud provider to help provide that. Some
cloud providers will offer ITSM as a service, while other cloud providers will
give you the infrastructure for you to apply your own process management
around. You have to understand how you are looking to apply ITIL internally,
and how your cloud providers work within that.
?
www.us.logicalis.com | 866.456.4422
1
Moving Strategic Aspects of Your Environment to a Cloud Model, Logicalis, October 23, 2012
?
continued
5. Grill your cloud provider.
Don’t look at your cloud provider as just as another IT vendor. They’re not.
Whatever organization you entrust with your important data and integral
cloud services needs to have the entirety of your confidence. So it’s
important to learn all you can about the provider, including:
■ The physical data center—What does the environment look like? Is it a
Tier III data center? What are the security policies around that in the
physical data center?
■ The network—How is the vendor providing isolation on network traffic
coming into my environment? Is my environment a shared multi-tenant?
Can I bring in my own private network connections, or can I come across
the internet to provide a connection to it?
■ Industry requirements—Is the provider certified in SAE-16, PCI, HIPAA
or any standard to which your industry must adhere?
Leave no stone unturned—your comfort level and familiarity are vastly
important.
Use these considerations to develop your custom strategy.
After you have taken an accurate inventory of the services you want to
move to the cloud, what type of cloud environment they need, and your
organization’s infrastructure and facilities, you can develop a cloud strategy.
In today’s business world, many organizations find a hybrid approach to the
cloud to be the most attractive. With the diversity of requirements that each
service and application brings, leveraging a combination of hosted public
and private clouds plus in-house cloud solutions is often the only way to get
agility and cost benefits without sacrificing availability and security. “No two
cloud strategies are ever the same,” says Martin.1
Interested in learning more about
cloud computing from the experts?
View our 30-minute online discussion! It’s free to watch, and the tips
you’ll learn are invaluable. Visit us at www.us.logicalis.com/
dcfast5 to learn more about cloud computing and other topics.