The 10 things you must consider for your cloud adoption strategy

Making the shift from on-premise technology infrastructure to a cloud-based architecture, specifically infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), is a significant decision and one that should be carefully considered for its impact across an organisation. When procuring infrastructure-as-a-service consider the following:

1. Cloud computing is different
Using IaaS is not just about the location of equipment. Cloud services are priced, bought and used differently, with an on-demand utility model that is designed to maximise spend, but needs a different approach to traditional technology infrastructure.

2. Early planning is essential
All key stakeholders across an organisation should be engaged in the decision to move to a cloud model. There will certainly be huge implications for finance, IT, operations, compliance, from board level down.

3. Flexibility
When planning an IaaS procurement, focus on performance at an application level as your requirement and allow the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) to make recommendations based on their experience and understanding of best practice. Prepare to be flexible and to adapt your expectations of the actual equipment and procedures, according to the advice given.

4. Separate cloud infrastructure and managed services
Keep procurements of IaaS and managed service labour separate if possible. It will make it easier to agree and monitor specific IaaS Service Level Agreements and terms and conditions.

5. Utility pricing
As mentioned, IaaS is priced using a utility model, or pay as you go model which allows you to make maximum efficiency gains. Customised billing and transparent pricing models allow you to continually evaluate and ascertain whether you are receiving best value for money and maximising usage.

6. Industry standards
Look out for CSPs with industry standard accreditations that you can trust. Cyber Essentials, ISO 27000, ISO 9000, SSAE, PCI, GDPR compliance are all good starting points and will save you time in re-evaluation.

7. Share responsibility
A CSP ensures that infrastructure is secure and controlled, but you ensure that you architect it correctly and use secure, controlled applications. Be aware of what is your responsibility and what is the responsibility of the CSP.

8. Ensure cloud data governance
Following on from cybersecurity and data protection, it is your responsibility to ensure cloud data governance controls are in place. Find out what identity and access controls are offered by the CSP and make provisions for additional data protection, encryption and validation tools.

9. Agree commercial item terms
Cloud computing is a commercial item and should be procured under appropriate terms and conditions. Ensure you utilise these to the best effect.

10. Define cloud evaluation criteria
In order to ascertain whether you have achieved your objectives and performance requirements, you should specify your cloud evaluation criteria at the outset. The National Institute of Standards and Technology outlines some benefits of cloud usage and is a good starting point for defining cloud evaluation criteria.

Use this list before you start to plan your IaaS project and it will help you define a successful procurement strategy.

The questions you should ask when planning your tape-to-cloud migration

With the huge advances in public cloud security, efficiency and value for money, many organisations are now planning to move towards cloud backup strategies, which are less complex and more reliable than traditional tape backup solutions. But migrating your backup to cloud from tape can be a big project and does require careful scoping. There are some key questions to ask before embarking on a migration from tape to cloud, which will help you to understand the scale of the project.

Firstly, do you need to move all historical backups to the cloud, or could you start backing up new data to the cloud and gradually reduce on-premises tape dependency as data reaches end-of-life? This is a straightforward approach but depends on the business being comfortable with different RPO and RTOs for new versus aged data.

Next, what is the best way of migrating a large data set to the cloud initially? You can use on-premises network transport methods, or physical transport methods. High speed internet transfer would only be an option for smaller data sets, as can be time consuming.

You might need to consider that when you move data from tape to cloud, it could be prudent to perform any indexing, transcoding or repackaging that will make it easier to extract value from the data once in the cloud.

Do you know if your current backup vendor can natively support a cloud backup store, or are new feature licenses or major version updates required? Once you’ve migrated, can you restore to cloud virtual machines or will data restore to a physical machine?

Can you write data directly to the cloud and do your backup windows support that too? Should you use a traditional storage protocol such as a network file system (NFS)?

Do you need to change your workflows to suit the cloud environment, or will your cloud solution appear as a virtual tape library allowing you to keep the same processes and save time and management overhead?

Does your cloud backup provider give you the scalability and elasticity needed to make changes without disruption to the backup activity? Enterprise cloud providers should have the provisions, AWS offers Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute which can flex to keep processes consistent.

When accessing backup data will this be done in the cloud, or will it be pulled back and accessed on-premises? It could affect the services you purchase, from archives which are seldom accessed to a virtual tape library which holds frequently accessed, recent files.

Can you leverage the cloud to simplify widely distributed backup workflows?

Many cloud providers offer complementary services such as analytics, data lifecycle management or compliance features. Do you need these as part of your backup solution?

Could a cloud integrator help you to scope, implement and migrate your current backup environment across to the cloud?

Getting answers to these questions now will save immeasurable time during and after your move to the cloud and can help you to maximise your budget, by cutting out unnecessary services.

Realising the Value of Modernising Your Legacy Infrastructure

Techopedia defines a legacy system as an outdated system, language or application that is used instead of available upgraded systems. The term “legacy” is often used pejoratively, but the reality is that most organisations do have some legacy infrastructure. It can be problematic as it gets older, becoming incompatible with new and emerging apps and technology. When legacy hardware and software is out of support with unpatched security elements it is at greater risk of a cyber-attack. Costs to run legacy systems increase as services become more frequent and more things start to go wrong. Older systems that have bits added here and there become increasingly complex and they invariably take longer to configure and provision to accommodate new services. New services and apps take longer to go live and therefore bring benefits to the users and businesses suffer from being cumbersome, slow and often with insufficient capacity to grow with the business.

Most CIOs understand that they need to modernise their infrastructure if they are going to keep up with the demands of a modern business. Modern apps and workloads need fast, agile, secure and scalable infrastructure to run as efficiently as they are able.

But a modernisation project involves more than just refreshing hardware when it needs an upgrade, it requires serious consideration and planning, with a long-term strategy. A strategy that leads the business towards the cloud. When planning to refresh infrastructure, consider solutions that will meet current needs, either on premise, or in the cloud, but also be flexible enough to adapt to moving other apps and workloads to the cloud, plus a plan for building and developing new apps and services, in the cloud. The cloud is the way for businesses to scale and to provide the power, speed and agility that modern apps demand. Only by speeding up the time to production, reducing IT overheads and automating business processes will businesses be able to compete. By automating as much as possible, staff can focus on high value work and are better placed to give the business a competitive edge.

The journey to the cloud is the most important aspect of any modernisation strategy and in “The Creative CIO’s Agenda: Six Big Bets for Digital Transformation”, KPMG places the journey to the cloud at the top of the list of digital priorities for CIOs, in order for them to both defend against disruption and be disruptors themselves.

Oracle Solaris was developed for the cloud and can accelerate the adoption of workloads in the cloud, with fast and intelligent provisioning, virtualised networking, simplified administration and stringent security features. By upgrading to Oracle Solaris, businesses can be assured of total protection for data and applications, speedy performance and simpler data management. Choosing infrastructure that is designed for the cloud will mean that whether applications and workloads are ready now, or in the future, it is a simple and seamless process.

Read more in the Oracle SPARC Solaris for Dummies guide or help your applications perform at optimal levels by running a WTL enterprise Solaris and Linux healthcheck.

Useful Links

Tech Funnel Article – Top 10 Priorities of CIOs in 2018

The Creative CIOs Agenda – Six Big Bets for Digital Transformation

IT Infrastructure

Getting Your Infrastructure Ready for Cloud?

Businesses everywhere and in every industry are under constant pressure in today’s highly competitive environment to increase productivity, reduce costs, and improve their business processes.

In fact, Gartner’s annual global survey of CIOs at the end of 2017 showed that the CIO role is transitioning from delivery executive to business executive, from controlling cost and engineering processes, to driving revenue and exploiting data, rapidly scaling their digital businesses to keep up. The survey found that growth is the number one CIO priority for 2018, as stated by 26% of CIOs. The use of digitised products and services is expected to drive new forms of revenue, business value and engagement of customers and citizens. The challenge for CIOs is how to grow it to deliver economies of scope and scale and how to optimise their infrastructure in order to meet these demands. In addition, increasing security threats and shrinking budgets are making it more challenging for businesses to achieve its goals.

Legacy infrastructure can hinder application performance and push operational costs up as a result, they aren’t designed to meet the emerging innovations and they can pose a security risk, with upgrades, unsupported systems and gaps in patches.

The cloud is developing at a rapid pace and is going a long way to meeting the demands of the modern business, providing agile, scalable, anywhere digital services that businesses and consumers want and giving organisations the ability to analyse and exploit data for better decision making.

It doesn’t mean that organisations have to shift wholesale to the cloud however, but by modernising infrastructure and moving to Oracle SPARC and Solaris, they can ensure they are cloud-ready, which is notably different to being entirely cloud-based. Oracle SPARC servers use the same technology in the cloud and on-premise, so when the planning has been done and businesses have a clear idea of what applications and workloads would benefit from being moved to the cloud, it is an easier prospect to move them now or in the future, when circumstances change.

Whether on premise or in the cloud, Oracle SPARC servers are incredibly scalable and highly performing, with fast response times and acceleration of analytics and Oracle databases. They’ve been designed to meet the needs of modern businesses today and in the future, if as outlined in LogicMonitor’s Cloud Vision 2020 survey, 83% of enterprise workloads will be in public, private or hybrid cloud environments by 2020.

In addition to meeting performance, scalability and efficiency goals, infrastructure powered by Oracle SPARC servers and Solaris meets head-on the increasing threat of cyber attack with advanced security capabilities, including data encryption and decryption, application memory protection, one step patching and user access features.

Businesses that are modernising and getting cloud-ready, need look no further than Oracle SPARC and Solaris. Further reading is available by downloading the Oracle Solaris for Dummies Guide.

Useful Links

Gartner Survey of CIOs

Cloud Vision 2020: The Future of the Cloud