Where to start the Cloud Journey....

As we can see the cloud adoption is increasing day by day, many organizations wanted to start however still few queries like below listed are not clear or not satisfied with the justification given by the consultants or Cloud Service Providers for the obvious reason of not knowing the depth of the sea.

1. What will be the latency?
2. How Secure the Cloud ?
3. Can I integrate with my existing Infrastructure / applications.
4. How about Performance?

Of course the accountability remain with IT decision makers of the organization hence they are more concerns about taking the first step.

I would recommend anybody to start doing some POC and play around with technologies before taking the baby step. Once familiar with know how then the ideal way is to start with Test & Dev. environment to taste the water before moving the production workloads.

Not every organizations are having dedicated test and development environment (may not for all applications), and SMBs mayn't  afford to have. Such organizations can start with offloading their painful job of moving the backups to offsite instead of moving the backup tapes manually. Old Archives or Backup dumps can be offloaded to cloud which will reduce the backup window and can release some space from existing storage for current projects and active data.

Backup as a Service (BaaS) can be a better choice for taking backups from endpoints like laptop especially from roaming users. Also BaaS will be an ideal choice for multisite environments to centralize the backup and to implement global backup policy. This will reduce multiple investments on backup tools and devices as well.  Eventually BaaS will simplify the backup admins job of managing, monitoring, restoring from multiple backups, coordinating with multiple person for offsite movement etc.,

Cloud can be a excellent choice for those who is planning to build their datacenter for Disaster Recovery site. DR on cloud not only reduces TCO it will also take away the headache of choosing tools & technologies for different applications. DR on cloud can be a complete DRaaS delivery model where CSP can comply the customers RPO (Recovery Point of Objective) or RTO (Recovery Time Objective) or it can be a DR on Demand for their warm and cold DRs.

Software as a Service which address niche area of customers business applications like CRM / communication & collaboration system are having lots of traction (i.e Office 365, Salesforce etc.). Many ISVs are already upgraded their application for cloud readiness and hosted / planning to host in market places of multiple clouds. SaaS based delivery model will give a greater ROI and will reduce the CAPEX as well.

The manthra of cloud is "Pay as you Go / Grow" might be excited for CFOs. Also cloud budgeting eases gives comfort for better forecasting with fixed cost models for both scaling up & down the IT workloads.

Nutshell, recommend to approach the cloud with greater vision and start smaller.

Article written by: Natarajan Gnanasekar, Technical Manager, Alpha Data.