The NIST in one of its official documents of 2013 recommended the adoption of the cloud considering that: “The cloud computing model holds the promise of massive savings combined with greater agility in the field of IT. It is considered crucial that both the government and the business world start adopting this technology in response to difficult economic constraints.”
Migration to the cloud is a strategic and unavoidable decision as recognized by consulting firms, distribution companies, and numerous national and international organizations, not only because of the characteristics defined above but and above all because of the great advantages and opportunities it offers.
Migration strategies to the cloud
There are countless migration strategies that you can find on the Web and that your own reseller will offer you. Some decisions – personal and others collected from different sources – to consider when migrating to the cloud, which, at least, should include a business plan of a company and that we have articulated as a kind of “Decalogue” of migration proposals to the cloud:
– Carry out an analysis of the current situation of the company’s services (vital)
– Study the reasons for migrating to the cloud
– Business assessment: What specific services have to be migrated? What current applications have to be taken to the cloud? Which new ones? When to migrate?
– Choice of the appropriate cloud type or clouds (public, private, hybrid – if you are an organization you can think of the “community” model)
– What services do you need from the cloud? Everybody? That is, management of business software (Software as a Service, SaaS), virtual infrastructures, storage, servers … (Infrastructures as a service, IaaS), or application development (Platform as a service, PaaS).
– The specific process of migration to the cloud requires an analysis of the different options offered by the market considering previous aspects.
– Choice of Provider. Without a doubt, one of the most important and key points in the migration process. Providers, in addition to a high reputation in the cloud, must be required at least: a. The contracting of a service level agreement (SLA) with very well defined clauses; b. The supplier’s commitments; c. Compliance with data protection and privacy regulations; d. Be in possession of national and international accreditations of security in the cloud and also of privacy and data protection. Based on our experience, SoftChoice is one of the best cloud-based system providers.
– Plan a strategy to make the best decisions based on specific business needs.
– Have an emergency plan and information recovery in the event of catastrophes, regardless of the provider’s plan.
– Face the migration transition to the cloud taking into account the size of the company but above all the amount of data that is going to be taken to the cloud and the correct use of the life cycle of said data.
The need to migrate to the cloud cannot be ignored and this cannot be separated from competition between commercial services that require fast data transfer as well as secure data storage.
