Things to Know Before Migrating to a Public Cloud

There should be absolutely no hesitation in accepting the fact that many businesses have started to rapidly adopt cloud services. According to Gartner, SaaS-based ERP solution adoption will grow at 28% in India, and likewise, there are many similar reports available on the web about cloud adoption trends. Organizations are migrating to public cloud so that they can focus on their business and not IT, reduce their capex and IT maintenance costs.

A key question organizations ask is what to move to the public cloud, and one key answer, after assessing the reasons we just mentioned is the sensitivity of data for the application you want to migrate. If its highly sensitive, then it should either remain within your own premise, or should move to a virtual private cloud, wherein you get your own private environment in the public cloud.

Some other key questions to ask include where does cloud computing really fit in your company, can you use cloud computing for some of the new applications that you are planning to deploy? Do you have any new and upcoming projects where cloud computing can help? Since cloud computing is driven more by the business requirements, it's important to check if any of the cloud based apps can help you meet those requirements in the most effective manner.

A few business imperatives to consider while assessing cloud computing vendors and solutions include maximum productivity with minimum expenditure, quality of service, security and resiliency, and finally reduced time to market. Check how well do different cloud computing solutions cater to these imperatives.

Apart from these, here are a few questions you should ask while evaluating a cloud computing vendor:

 

• What is the level of security provided? What are the measures which ensure that data leakage is not there?
• What is the stability of service provider in terms of years in business and strength in cloud services?
• How scalable is the system? How will it respond when some changes are incorporated?
• How strictly SLAs are followed?
• How and where is data stored?

Lastly, before finalizing a vendor, run a dummy project on the vendor's infrastructure so that you can get a feel for what you're getting into.