On the surface, that definition sounds wonderful to most C-Level executives. There is no doubt that Cloud Computing has moved into the mainstream of business life. Initially adopted by small businesses with limited budgets and IT resources, the ‘Cloud’ is now being accepted by large enterprises who seek the same benefits: scalability, flexibility, burstable capacity, pay-per-use billing, less overhead for hardware infrastructure and less dependency on the internal IT staff. Yet with all its benefits, there are definitely things to consider before jumping onto this ride through the Cloud.
10. Have you considered ALL the costs? “Buyer Beware” has never been more true than in the Cloud. The initial sales pitch and obvious benefits are being presented at an amazing pace, but a wise business person will weigh in on all the costs involved. What are the limits to the ‘included’ bandwidth and disk usage estimates? What are the costs for Firewalls and AntiVirus products? Are daily backups included? If so, how are they accessed when a system restore is necessary, and at what cost? It is critically important to understand all of the costs involved as well as any limitations of the solution being presented.
9. Have you considered WHO is “watching the farm?” While most hosting facilities have “Service Level Agreements,” few monitor anything more than server “up time” and bandwidth usage. While this is important, themetrix may not have anything to do with the user experience or the actual user perceived performance of the hosting infrastructure.
8. Do you have any idea WHERE your system is really located? Most Cloud providers will not guarantee the geographic location of your installation, and that DOES make a difference. In recent tests of servers located in San Jose, Denver and Washington DC the results were dramatically different. The national average is roughly a 4.5 second response rate. Servers on the East Coast provided results in less than 2 seconds, while servers in the Midwest and West Coast lagged to a grinding 8 seconds, and some as slow as 10 seconds. Location DOES matter.
7. Have you determined WHO is responsible? While the Cloud certainly offloads the day-to-day responsibilities from the internal staff to an outside provider, it does not remove the responsibility of testing and monitoring the system on a regular and ongoing basis by your organization. To achieve success, this internal responsibility must be well-understood and assigned to the appropriate personnel who will keep a watchful eye on the entire platform.
6. Have you tested the USER experience? Most system users today are accustomed to both internal, on-premise based software experience as well as their business or personal on-cloud usage. For those systems that are on-premise, the user expects a smooth, very fast, feature-rich presentation of the software. In contrast, the user experience can be dramatically different when using on-Cloud systems.
5. Do you know what your CUSTOMERS want from your website or web portal? Although most cloud applications today are available for use by your internal staff, there are also opportunities to push these cloud-based programs out to your customers and vendors as well. Employee, Customer and Vendor “Self-Service” options are becoming more and more prolific within cloud applications. The obvious benefits include cutting down on the customer service calls and empowering your employees to check on the status of things on their own. Thus, it might be important to check in with your customers to see what they would like to have available and to make it easier for them to do business with you.
4. Have you outlined a Contingency Plan in the event that your Internet connectivity or Data Center goes down?Just because the data is in a ‘hardened’ facility with generator backup and all sorts of redundancy, there is still the possibility that the system will become inaccessible for any number of reasons. If that were to happen, what is the immediate plan to keep the business running and orders going out the door?
3. Have you considered the PERFORMANCE issue? It is a well-known fact that Cloud Data Centers exhibit a wide variety of performance thresholds depending on their capacity and geographic location. It has been noted that some providers are as much as 10 times slower than others and some may or may not be able to ‘ramp up’ as quickly as others. Google recently reported that its pass-through traffic can drop as much as 20% if a search results page doesn’t fully render within a half-second. Amazon says it loses 1% of sales when pages are slower than a 10th of a second.
2. Is your IT Staff willing to let go of their DOMAIN? Your IT staff, whether in-house or your professional services company, has worked very hard to provide you the best network and infrastructure possible. Moving that out of their hands and into a world they cannot touch is no small subject to tackle. Talk of this type of move can be quite unnerving to a CIO or Network Administrator.
1. Are you willing to release CONTROL of your data? Business executives have always been very protective of their data. Lists of Customers, Prospects, Vendors and Inventory have been a highly guarded treasure of most companies for fear they may fall into the hands of the competition. Yet, take a moment to reflect on the success of Salesforce.com. Companies who have adopted it have already chosen to put some of their most valuable data (their CUSTOMERS and PROSPECTS) on the “Cloud.”
The push into the Cloud has opened some tremendous opportunities for businesses around the world. It is an interesting phenomenon that has brought us full circle, reminiscent of the days where huge mainframe computers sat in specially designed computer rooms and users simply accessed them through ‘dumb’ terminals. The benefits are compelling and yet the challenges can be daunting. Thus, the best advice to those considering the “Cloud” is to find a trusted resource that can help navigate the way, consider the costs and insure that the outcome will have your business “Flying High” … in the Cloud.
