Creating a Cloud Readiness Assessment

Your business model and goals. It’s hard to narrow this down in just one article, but the first thing to understand will be your current business model and where your organization is headed. Are you planning aggressive expansion? Are you planning on taking on additional users or branches? Are you deploying a new type of application or product? Are there core reasons to move an application, data set or entire platform into the cloud? Through research and working with cloud and industry professionals, you’ll be able to create a business model that will scale from your current platform into the cloud. Here’s why this is important: ROI. Through your use-case and business model analysis, you may very well find that moving to a cloud platform is not financially conducive. Or you might require a different approach.

Your user base. In today’s ever-evolving technology world, the end-user has become even more critical. The always-on generation is now demanding their data anywhere, anytime, and on any device. How capable will your cloud platform be to deliver this rich content to your end-users? How well can you ensure an optimal user experience in the cloud? During your assessment, take the time to do a very good user survey. Find out how they compute, which devices they use, and what resources they are accessing. The last thing you want to do is build a cloud platform without direct end-user input.

Your existing physical infrastructure. Are you sitting on new gear or are you overdue for a hardware refresh? All of this is part of the cloud assessment process. Your ability to replicate into the cloud will be directly impacted by your current underlying physical environment. The reality is simple: if your gear is extremely outdated, you may need to fix some in-house issues before moving into the cloud. A workload running on a certain type of physical system now may behave very differently in the cloud later. If your environment is pretty much new, consider various cloud options. In some cases, organizations ship their own servers into a cloud provider’s data center. The need to upgrade or implement new hardware requirements can definitely add to the bottom line of any cloud migration project.

Your existing logical infrastructure. We operate in a virtualized world. Software-defined technologies, advanced levels of virtualization, cloud computing, and mobility are all influencing our data center and business models. With that in mind, a cloud readiness assessment must scale both the physical and logical aspects of your environment. Are you already virtualizing your applications? How old are those apps? Can pieces of your environment even run on a cloud platform? For replication purposes, do you need to upgrade your own virtual systems? Even beyond the physical aspect – working with the data side of your environment is going to be the most challenging. Applications, their dependencies, and the data associated with it all are important considerations during an assessment.

Selecting the optimal cloud option. The progression of cloud infrastructure offers an organization a number of options. Colocation, various cloud models, and even the hybrid approach are all viable for the modern business. The important piece is selecting the right option. To give you a realistic perspective, in some cases it makes sense to build out your own data center because your business model, user-base, and future business goals all require it. The point is that there are a number of options to work with.