Steps to Understanding Your IT Before Moving to the Cloud

Posted on by Marc Pinotti

To understand your IT before moving to the cloud is an essential strategy to be developed by the On-Premises owners, in – order to best use the cloud services and products. According to National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), “Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that Can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction”. Therefore, the strategy must include the service methodologies, and the approach to reach the objectives aligned with service-level agreements (SLAs) and other guidelines for IaaS/PaaS/SaaS.
Analyze the following requirements:
• The On-Premise applications might require optimizing the solutions automatically for server time, networking storage and system operations.
• Infrastructure might require Broad network bandwidth with secured network protocols and standard solutions to access services for their full utilization.
• The requirements for thick and thin client platforms such as for Smart cellular phones and gadgets must be fulfilled with best performance scenarios and data accessibility.
• Specifying any location at higher level of categorization such as for country, state or datacenters as the CSP might be providing resource pooling with multi tenancy at different levels for physical and virtual allocation.
• Provisioning of system capabilities must be proportionate and flexible with that on cloud to be adopted quickly with adequate performances.
• Identification of resource usability in terms of storage, processing, bandwidth and active user sessions per account. Cloud will monitor and control each service with transparency, either for consumer or for provider.
• Understanding the SaaS model, will enable the consumer on how to use the provider’s application on cloud. Consumer will no more have the control or could limit the authorization or authentication for user specific configurational settings with respect to storage, networking, servers and operating systems. The application on cloud will be accessible through various client interface such as web browsers, desktop or mobile interfaces.
• In PaaS, the consumer can provide privileges for the application- hosted environment but do not have to manage the complete infrastructure and will be supported by tools and services by the provider.
• Under IaaS, the consumer is free to control over the operating systems, storage and networking and could limit and protect the system with different options available such as firewall hosting and the cloud management services will be delivered by the provider.
• On a private cloud, the On-Premise application will be provisioned to be extensively and exclusively used for a single organization with multiple consumers or business domains. The services might be owned and managed by the organization itself or by a third party and may exist on or off premises.
• Identify, if your organization require a “Community Cloud” for system and application to be accessed by a specific community of consumers for shared resources and concerns such as mission, security issues, policy and compliance requirements. System under these can be operated and owned by any one organization within the community or by a third party and may exist on or off premises.
• The application of On-Premises will now be accessible openly by the public and may be owned and managed by any of the organization (academic / Government).The system infrastructure will be deployed on the premises of cloud provider.
• For the Hybrid cloud, the private or public clouds can be merged with unique identification for each but are combined together with standard or registered technology that enables data and application movability such as cloud bursting for load balancing in cloud systems.
• While migrating to cloud, the application architecture must be analyzed for application management, security, environment compatibility and database compatibility.
• All the system architectural patterns with respect to distributed computing are equally applicable for applications developed for on-premises or cloud deployment.
• Operations on cloud require data to use and make effective decisions. The scenarios include service-level agreements, capacity planning, customer billing, auditing, monitoring and analyzing traffic and effectively manage costs associated with each service. Exact estimations must be done before deployment of any application on cloud and for best performances; these must be analyzed before the system is developed.
• Consumers need to analyze the data sources of the application (User entry or database or any other application), the integration mechanism with other components, the standardization of process and the exact resources of development of any product. Through this, one can determine the application readiness for cloud migration with minimized resources for physical and virtual space on cloud.