Cloud computing is forever changing the way organizations deliver IT to end users. Whether it’s applications such as email and customer relationship management, or data storage and high-end processing, the cloud has dramatically altered the corporate technology landscape.
Cloud services offer potential benefits such as cost savings, increased agility and the ability to easily scale services. But it also offers possible challenges, not the least of which is the massive change that it can bring to organizations.
Prior to migrating workloads to the cloud, it’s a good idea to answer some basic key questions:
- What is the business case for moving to the cloud? Why exactly are we doing this?
- Who should be involved in deciding what IT components to move to the cloud and when? And can we handle this on our own, or do we need to bring in expert consultants and managed services providers to help?
- What infrastructure components, applications and workloads are we ready to move to the cloud today? Or, put another way, which IT components should not be moved to the cloud at this point?
- What kind of security/compliance measures will we need to take to ensure that data is protected in the cloud environment?
Naturally there are many more questions to ask as part of this strategic move. But the above four are essential to cover before moving on to more granular areas.
In our next post, we’ll discuss the potential benefits of the cloud.