Organizations that decide to take their entire IT landscape, or parts of it, to the cloud need to consider the different factors that need to be prioritized according to their needs.
Cloud costs
Cost is a sensitive topic for many organizations when it comes to investing in new technologies. According to a McKinsey and Company survey, organizations often struggle with calculating the costs that arise from paying different cloud services. This cost is also highly dependent on how their current IT infrastructure is built and used. Organizations not only face the costs for replacing on-premises systems, but they need to also consider the effort to rearchitect and redesign their own processes inside their applications as well as the applications themselves to make them ready for the cloud. The four key costs include the migration itself, the redevelopment of applications and processes, the subscription costs to the cloud service provider (CSP) and the maintenance costs for further improvements to their own applications.
However, when implementing the cloud, the survey shows that the correct usage can reduce costs across functions. Supply chain management, manufacturing, marketing and sales, and business support costs could be reduced by up to 20 percent. Many CSPs also offer new technologies that come with their services, such as artificial intelligence, that the organization can profit from.
The cloud is paid mostly in subscription models, which enables organizations to charge the costs as operational expenditures that could lead to benefits in taxation compared to capital expenditures for investing once in on-premises infrastructure.
High availability/disaster recovery
Another important topic that chief information officers care about is the cloud's high availability and its disaster recovery. When paying monthly or yearly for cloud services, organizations expect nearly no outages. When downtimes occur, they expect them to be short. Nearly all CSPs offer overviews on the availability of their services. The percentage can be used to compare different CSPs. Google provides a simple table that shows how much time of the year a service is down for the given percentages. The high availability and the actions the CSP takes to recover the disaster are contractually settled in service level agreements (SLAs).
Cybersecurity Cybersecurity is essential. When hosting on-premises systems, organizations take full responsibility of their security. When shifting to the cloud, the CSP takes on more of that responsibility. Since CSPs have the possibility to invest much more into cybersecurity than individual organizations, organizations profit from the economies of scale. Focusing only on the cloud services, CSPs are also able to invest in the newest technologies to maintain their high level of security capabilities. However, organizations should still need to pay attention to existing data residency regulations as CSP data centers can often be located in different countries.
Scalability
Another topic that impacts the costs of used cloud services is the cloud's possibility to turn services on and off in response to their necessity. When having huge data loads, resources such as virtual machines or additional computing power can be added. If administrated correctly, it is possible to only pay for the computing power that is currently needed in the cloud. This aspect is heavily important for businesses that have volatile data loads on their servers.
Before moving to the cloud, organizations must decide which IT landscape architecture they need. It is possible to invest in a private cloud, a community cloud, a public cloud or a hybrid cloud. Each of these deployment models brings its own advantages and disadvantages. Enterprise architect professionals need to carefully weigh which deployment model is the best for their use case.
Integration and extension capabilities
Integration and extension capabilities are important when looking at platforms as a service (PaaS). To connect different applications and services, organizations are highly dependent on the cloud's integration capabilities. For building up hybrid landscapes, it is essential to use an integration PaaS. These cloud services lay the foundation for the successful development of one's own applications as well as the connection of on-premises and cloud-based applications and services. This offers organizations the possibility to combine the advantages of their on-premises systems with the advantages of cloud services.
A matter of prioritization
It is essential for organizations to prioritize which elements of cloud use are most important for designing their IT landscape to successfully execute their business operations. Key decisions must be made regarding calculating upcoming costs, how much time the enterprise accepts for downtimes, how to maintain effective cybersecurity, whether the IT department's scalability is important for the business, which deployment model is the best and what needs to be integrated into a possible cloud environment.
Editor's note:For further insights on this topic, read Lukas Werner's recent Journal article, "Migrating to the Cloud: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Has Affected the IT Landscape," ISACA Journal, volume 1, 2022.
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