There is a lot of talk about cloud computing today and the supply of suppliers is becoming more extensive, but how can you really help our organizations bring our services to the cloud? Which cloud to choose? What services to bring? How to bring them? Will cloud computing take away our job? are some of the questions that arise when starting to think about incorporating these services into our strategy.
There are some clear examples of organizations that have been able to find ways to benefit from this type of services. One of the clearest examples to explain is that of the media portals. Usually newspapers or portals have their own infrastructure already designed to withstand the usual load of visits they receive, but what happens when a transcendent event arises such as the death of a famous or the episode of September 11? Many times before these bombs news portals collapse by the number of visits they receive right at the time users most use it, leaving a bad image.
Another clear example of the contribution of the cloud well used for the organizations is that of the events or great fairs. A client does not have much to design an application for the coverage of a fair of 3 days where the number of attendees could be between 5000 and 20,000 people throughout the expo. How to plan the necessary infrastructure to meet the real demand of the fair? If we used a traditional strategy we would have to contemplate and acquire an infrastructure capable of supporting 20,000 people accessing it (which would be an unnecessary expense and waste of resources) and after the three days of the event find a use of this infrastructure. Seeing that this strategy clearly was not useful the organizing company looked for options finding in a cloud provider the solution. I mount the event on the cloud, spending only what was necessary radically less than acquiring an infrastructure and being able to cover the demand that the event was to have.
As these there are thousands of examples and industries that have been incorporating cloud computing to their business strategies. In these two examples we see how the business can find benefits in the cloud and IT to accompany the needs of the business without having to make unnecessary expenses.But how to choose which cloud to use and which services are the ones that serve me to migrate? the knowledge of the organization by the IT administrator is going to become fundamental to the business and will leave aside the current role in which is seen by the business as simply an expense. So, if this is the way, how to prepare our virtual infrastructure to have that dynamism? First it would be convenient to transform our virtualization into a private cloud where we can better understand the services and demands of our business. Once we have done this step we will be able to quantify and better know how to bring value to our organization, and can then start thinking about how to reduce costs or improve the delivery of some services by supporting the public cloud. At this moment in which we have services running in our cloud and others in some private cloud under our control, we will be the happy administrators of a hybrid cloud. You do not need to find benefits in the public cloud moving up to this instance, but I think it’s highly recommended.
If we reach this stage of maturity, we can better justify our decisions and better understand the needs of our business, achieving a better management of resources. Finally comes the instance of choosing the components and allies that support our strategy. This is where there are three factors that we must not forget:
While there are many more things to keep in mind, I hope these recommendations help them to start using the cloud and better understand what to look for in the world of clouds.
