By Jason Hart, CDW Cloud Client Executive
In reforming the world of IT, the cloud continues to attract corporate customers as we drift into 2015. While the cloud is absorbing a wide range of software and hardware applications across the board, there remain gaps in cloud migrations. These failures are addressed here for the benefit of new customers who are considering a transition to cloud platforms.
photo source: iStock
Dive Headfirst into the Cloud
A common mistake made by cloud early adopters is overlooking the soft costs associated with cloud computing. This throws ROI/TCO for a loop. Begin with an itemized IT budget that includes specific internal costs, i.e. it costs $10 per mailbox to support internally. Typical IT budgets have a 50/50 division, with 50 percent going to hardware, software and maintenance, and the remaining half covering staff costs. Consider staff support costs needed to manage workloads in the cloud.
Have an Unrealistic Change Process Strategy
An improperly prepared IT staff will not be ready to handle a switch over to the cloud. Businesses tend to overlook the costs associated with training staff to utilize the cloud on an ongoing basis, such as with incident management. Whether workloads are managed in-house or handled by a cloud partner, management is up to you. Therefore, you must:
- Understand how to manage SLAs with providers and partners, as well as how to hold them accountable with penalties
- Understand how and when to reallocate resources including the creation of new roles such as a contract manager
Don’t Include Security and Legal Teams Early
Your security and legal teams must be aware of your pending move to the cloud. If you move from strategy to design mode without recognizing the need for a PCI or HIPAA compliant environment, your project will be at risk. A recent HIPAA change restricts data from sitting on leased infrastructure. What if your company’s IP is sitting unguarded in a public cloud? These are examples of risks you don’t want to take on without legal or security expertise at your side therefore, including them early in the changeover process is crucial.
Fail to Consider End-User Adoption
Understand that most IT staff are capable of picking up the cloud platforms and processes at a much faster rate than the end users, i.e. line of business managers, customer service, or sales teams. While the IT staff might be gung ho with adopting new cloud computing capabilities giving them more flexibility and automation, others may lag behind in the adoption of new systems or processes.
Do Not Consider Staff Capabilities and Resistance
Many IT departments lack the capabilities to migrate, integrate, and manage workloads in the cloud. Staff may realize their inability to skillfully support cloud services, leading to resistance. Alternatively, if an IT staff is constantly in fire-fight mode and operating under unpredictable outcomes and ill-managed IT costs, moving to an IT “as a service” provider could be attractive to the business leaders. Partnering with certain cloud service providers could outweigh the costs of training and/or hiring the staff with the necessary skills.
Ignoring the Need for Resources to Migrate
According to Paul Schaapman, a seasoned IT leader and datacenter solution architect, “The typical IT staff is not up to par, generally, when it comes to migrating to and managing cloud environments. Take Bob who’s been in IT for the last 20 years and says he can migrate everything. Can he actually provide this service at a professional level? Probably not when compared to partners who built their business around cloud migrations. Furthermore, IT staff is typically not capable of performing dependency mapping at the necessary level. Consider an unexpected cost if you are forced to rely on partners for migration, a common occurrence for customers new to the cloud.”
Move to the Cloud for the Wrong Reasons
Going to the cloud is not always a cost-savings exercise. Cloud infrastructure options are endless, but it’s often cumbersome for businesses to determine the actual costs for buying, renting or building in the cloud. The main reason businesses should be going to the cloud is to standardize the infrastructure and focus on the application layer. This increases a business’s ability to perform value-added activities to the business. The cloud, in that aspect, is an investment rather than a cost-saving maneuver. Most businesses choose the cloud for its flexibility especially during seasonal spikes, i.e. Black Friday for online retailers, where they can burst and spin-down resources quickly with a cost structure that aligns with their usage.
What is the Solution?
For businesses considering a leap to the cloud:
- Follow ITIL methodologies of service strategy, design, transition, operation, and continuous service improvement process.
- Itemize your IT services and determine internal costs associated with delivering them.
- Conduct business impact analysis to determine the protection of mission critical applications.
- Organize your applications based on whether or not they can operate in the cloud.
- Assess the appropriate security, performance, integration, legal, and governance requirements of each workload.
- Perform a lifecycle management assessment across hardware, software, maintenance, and deprecation cycles.
- Determine your financial biases OpEx or CapEx?
- Map long-term initiatives to ensure the proper platform can integrate.
- Assess current and anticipated network and bandwidth requirements.
- Determine which services you can successfully manage in-house and which partners can manage for you.
Going to the cloud can push your business offerings to the next level. However, it isn’t as simple as flipping a switch or purchasing a prepackaged program. Taking note of these issues will keep your head out of the clouds during this possible transition.
Jason Hart is an ITIL-certified Cloud Client Executive with CDW. With over 14 years of IT sales experience across various market segments, he provides clients with definitional, categorical and strategic expertise around CDW’s cloud computing portfolio. Jason also serves as a “face-in-the-cloud,” conducting in-market speaking events on emerging market trends and cloud adoption use cases.
