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Sunday, 22 May 2016 Blog ehdf

Transitioning to the Cloud – Best Practices

Enterprises around the world are increasingly jumping on the cloud computing bandwagon and have in the process made significant investments on various technologies in order to attain a competitive edge. CIO’s must however, keep in mind some key factors before transitioning to the cloud:

1.CIOs need to assess the company’s long-term business and infrastructure needs, establish realistic goals and priorities, set deadlines and consult with finance directors on IT budgets. This is important because reversing IT systems is time-consuming and expensive.

2.Apart from having an understanding of what resources are available for implementation and maintenance, CIOs should, with proper planning and strategy, keep the complexity and cost to a minimum. They need to determine whether the transition will be managed in-house or outsourced to a third party vendor.

3.CIOs need to evaluate both private and public cloud options and see which platform best meets their business requirements. Before moving information to the cloud, they need to conduct an internal review with business heads to identify which data can be moved to the cloud. Full cloud integration may cause regulatory compliance issues as certain data must be secured internally. Enterprises must also be cautious of where they store different types of data.

4.They need to ensure that their organizations have effective data recovery and backup management tools in place in case of any loss during data synchronization. If the organization has planned to outsource the migration, it is important to know if the cloud services provider has a robust data backup strategy and recovery procedures.

Choosing the right cloud vendor

While choosing a cloud vendor, it is important for organizations to review and evaluate their security standards, policies and governance models to ensure that their organizations’ data is safe, secure and protected at all times. They must be aware of procedural and policy differences between their organization, external companies and software vendors. They need to understand where the data will be stored and comply with the legal requirements in their own country as well as the country of the cloud services provider. Organizations can also consider a hybrid solution to secure critical data.

We recommend partnering with a cloud services provider (CSP) who offers service level agreements (SLAs), 24/7/365 support and follows security standards, processes and procedures to get the most value from a hybrid cloud model. Local CSPs could provide enterprises with a local data center and 24/7 bilingual local support.