Of late, we are being inundated with sales and marketing hype regarding 'The Cloud". There's no doubt that there are good reasons to look deeply into how you can leverage it's benefits.

Over the last few years, I've attended dozens of seminars, workshops, conferences, presentations, and even BBQ's! hosted by all the major vendors spruiking the wonders of their flavour of the Cloud.

The trick is to work out which flavour of cloud and to what extent you use it. Or in some cases, not at all!

The key takeaway has nothing to do with the technology itself. It's about each individual business and at what point in the Cloud journey their starting from.

Here's what I mean:

Take Company A for example. They have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars investing in their own data centre over the last 5 years. They've virtualised most of their servers, gaining considerable cost benefits. Does it make sense to throw all that away and move to a public cloud provider? Maybe, maybe not.

Or Company B... They haven't invested heavily in virtualisation, and have happily gone about growing their business on the back of 'buy another server' IT expansion. Well, there's many factors to consider here:

Virtualisation

Their migration is going to be easier if its already a virtual machine. A V2C (Virtual to Cloud) is going to be a simpler transition than a P2C (Physical to Cloud).  What is their current virtualisation level?Is it worth virtualising as many applications as possible before migration to Cloud?

Centralise

Where do the their current workloads live? Do they have remote offices or a centralised model or single site? Are the servers in close proximity to the accessing users? Once they start to move to a Cloud model their workloads are going to be accessed via a network, whether that be their own, a private network or the Internet. The proximity of the applications is going to change and this may have unexpected effects.

Centralising is a often a good 'early win' in the overall strategy. It can help identify any application issues before they start moving workloads to the Cloud.

Network

How  efficient is their wide area and local area networking? A key element to Cloud is that it is connecting to remote services over a network and to be prepared for Cloud you want to ensure that the network is going to be up to the task.

Cost Model

What does it cost in terms of dollars and kilowatts to run a workload in their environment today? If they do not know their internal costs, regardless of whether they are passing those costs back to internal departments, it's going to be much harder for them to do a business case for moving some workloads into a Cloud. When the Cloud provider quotes you a dollar per Gb for storage what does it cost them to operate and maintain storage per Gb now? Understanding their current internal costs is important to prepare for moving to Cloud.

Or Company C who is a start up. They know what IT services they need to support their business plan. But what's the best way to have those services delivered? Depends!

That's why here at Discovery Technology, we have put together a Cloud Assessment Workshop. Through years of listening to all the major vendors, dissecting their strengths and weaknesses, we have a strong understanding of what is out in the market place. We can help businesses assess their current state, their needs, and then align those to the offerings out there.

Contact us today, and see how we can help you map your journey to greater productivity and efficiency.