Is speed everything?
Cloud hosting is often deemed the panacea for all infrastructure problems: no CAPEX, simple cost structure, no obsolescence, faster load speeds, flexible and scalable.
However, recent problems with some cloud hosting providers (see Amazon AWS S3 outage is breaking things for a lot of websites and apps) forced some cloud user to define (or redefine) a strategy for their cloud (and on-premise) infrastructure.
Regardless of the advantages of cloud infrastructures, a cookie cutter approach to defining a cloud infrastructure won’t be optimal for most firms and could expose them to potential problems; including outages, unforeseen costs, lag due to incompatible systems, lack of redundancy, unnecessary complexity, and problems arising from shared workload.
Speed
Faster load times and increased processing power lead to bigger profits. Faster loading websites will lead to more people visiting and staying at a website (with as many as 40% of users leaving websites if they fail to load within 3 seconds), while increasing processing power will allow you to analyze data faster as well as process more forms and requests quicker.
Adding more processors, memory and storage can help firms improve the performance of their IT processes. However, static performance won’t be the only thing affecting your processes, so several other factors should be considered when implementing a cloud strategy.
Before migrating part or all of your infrastructure to the cloud, a firm need to understand their business process and what IT services are affected. Different strategies should be used depending on weather the firm seeks to move its entire infrastructure to the cloud, use it for computing power, host applications or data or simply use an online software service.
Security
A cloud provider should follow all the security procedures you would implement on your on-site servers, including installing firewalls, antivirus, multifactor user authentication, conducting background checks of its employees and protecting the data center (from natural disasters, fires and power outages). The security of network-to-network connections should also be analyzed to ensure data security.
Redundant systems and facilities should be implemented for mission critical processes and to protect your firm in case of data losses. Some providers will compensate clients in case of data losses, but to ensure business continuity, redundancies should be placed to mitigate data loss risk.
Support services offered by providers should also be analyzed, not only as they provide assistance during outages, but also since compatibility issues may arise with certain programs.
All relevant IT and business factors should be considered when choosing a cloud provider and defining an IT strategy. Speed will get you business, but security and robustness will keep you in business.
Inttao offers full IT and cloud consulting services. You can check out the services we offer here (poner link a seccion de cloud services). Or contact us today to see how a well-defined and implemented cloud strategy can reduce your costs and help grow your business.