Migrating to the Cloud? Pave the Way For Dynamic Infrastructure With Effective Planning

Featured article by Sheldon Smith, Senior Product Manager, XO Communications

Cloud migration remains a challenge for businesses. According to a June 9^th article from Cloud Pro, reporting on a recent Cloud Industry Forum study, just 10 percent of all senior IT professionals asked said their migration “could not have been improved.” The sheer complexity of moving to the cloud proved troublesome for 38 percent of respondents, and 30 percent had issues with data sovereignty.

Though what’s the root cause of these issues? In many cases, problems with cloud migration are tied in a rush to implement new services without a clear purpose or plan. Here are five tips to help smooth your move:

Know Before You Go

The end goal of any cloud deployment? Dynamic infrastructure that scales up on demand and gives you total control over every aspect of your computing environment. However, here’s the problem: Too many companies look for this benefit from day one; when asked about why they moved to the cloud, the answer is often “because everyone else is doing it.”

While the cloud offers benefits for companies of all sizes, the first step in developing an effective migration plan is to identify specific pain points that will be addressed by a move. Are legacy applications bogging down the network? Are there simply not enough resources to go around? By clearly defining cloud goals — and the metrics used to measure these goals — you can reduce the chance of spending without commiserate success.

Test Often

Before making the move to a public, private or hybrid cloud it’s critical to test the impact of as-a-service resources on your local network. Information Age recommends that you benchmark cloud services on a trial basis to determine their impact on infrastructure load and network response times. Better to know that you need more bandwidth before committing a large portion of your IT budget to the cloud.

Get Help

The Information Age piece also points out that it’s a good idea to enlist expert, third-party help when it comes to selecting a cloud provider. This might take the form of a cloud brokerage or contracted cloud specialist, but no matter the route you choose, planning is key: Know what your current system looks like and what you want to achieve. This lets you make best use of your third-party expert by supplying him/her with expectations about your SLA, for example a guarantee about infrastructure performance instead of simple availability. Most SLAs don’t come standard with this kind of guarantee but many providers are willing to negotiate — after all, high availability and security mean next to nothing without superior performance.

Go Long Term

Enterprise CIO Forum, meanwhile, notes that planning needs to extend beyond the first stage of migration. Specifically, companies need to decide what’s going to change in the cloud right out of the gate and what stays the same. It comes down to the difference between migration and renovation of IT systems — trying to do both at the same time is a recipe for disaster.

Train and Model

The final planning tip to help ensure your cloud delivers on the promise of robust and dynamic infrastructure? Train your staff and model the move in small scale first. Migrating to the cloud often comes with a cultural shift as departments lose a measure of control over resources and data. To solve this problem before it starts, educate front-line staff on cloud basics and have the IT department “walk the walk” by deploying a small-scale cloud to demonstrate that a balance of outsourcing and internal oversight is possible.

Moving to the cloud? Plan first and plan well to empower dynamic infrastructure.

Sheldon Smith is a Senior Product Manager at XO Communications (xo.com). XO is a nationwide provider of advanced IP communications services for businesses. Sheldon has extensive experience in the communications field. At XO, Sheldon’s position involves overall product ownership of Hosted PBX, SIP, VoIP and Conferencing.