Cloud strategy is first and foremost about defining your goals for adopting cloud. Most enterprises identify two or three of these needs as their primary goals: Improve efficiency, Expanding markets, or reducing risk. Once you have identified your goals for adopting a cloud strategy, then you can focus on your requirements. Aligning the business and technical requirements of your central IT and business units is critical to the success of your cloud strategy. Avoid the common mistake of jumping in before defining business outcomes and establishing governance and control.

Your requirements will dictate whether a multi-cloud approach leveraging two or more public clouds or private clouds is optimal for your needs versus a hybrid cloud architecture where workloads run in both public and private clouds. Surveys and studies show that multi-cloud adoption is an ongoing trend from previous years. Among enterprises, 85 percent report that they have a multi-cloud strategy, which includes the use of multiple public clouds or multiple private clouds or a hybrid approach that includes the use of both public and private clouds.

What defines a cloud service?

As in any modern acronym, definition, new product or service, confusion reigns over what is and what is not a cloud service. Here are some of the salient features of a cloud service, where there is growing industry consensus.

Self-service: If you can't go to a web site, set up your account(s), and start provisioning over the Web yourself, then it's not a cloud service. With the self-service approach, epitomized by Amazon EC2, you don't need to spend hours on the phone working out your special configuration.

Commodity pricing: self-service enables cloud service providers to keep costs down. You have an array of pay-per-use (or subscription) options, and if you don't like them, you go somewhere else.

Transparent scalability: If you want more of a service, you go to your service provider's web site and specify more and your bill goes up accordingly,

Shared infrastructure: Cloud services have a one-to-many relationship with their customers. Software-as-a-service providers, for example, deliver their wares in multitenant fashion, where a single instance of the software runs on the provider's servers and all users log onto that same instance. Infrastructure-as-a-service providers move around customer VMs as needed, so that VMs from multiple customers often run on the same server.

Is it reliable and should I move to the cloud??

As the cloud has matured, it has become a more cost-effective alternative to a traditional technology deployment. Typical on-premise technology platforms require a significant capital expenditure to build out solid facilities and purchase hardware and licensing. In addition, it is expensive to hire all of the skill sets needed to run information technology (IT) infrastructure, and with the cloud, necessary and costly backup and redundancy are inherently enabled.

The cloud is generally a safe alternative to on-premise technology, but it is always a good idea to perform due diligence on potential cloud providers. In addition, some cloud providers may be more enticing targets for hackers. However, economies of scale allow many cloud providers to implement security measures that private businesses may not be able to afford.

How do I get started with implementing the cloud?

To understand whether your data and applications are a good fit for the cloud, an assessment from a trusted advisor can help identify which cloud constructs make the most sense for your technical needs. The assessment can also help you understand how the solution is being used in your industry and identify a logical order of events for transitioning to the cloud.

The cloud can bring many benefits to your company, but you must understand how your needs align with cloud capabilities and available platforms. More importantly, as the popularity of the cloud rises, so does the amount of provider options, some more reputable than others. However, bringing the right provider, security and recovery options, and IT resources together can help make your journey to the cloud smooth with greater efficiencies and cost savings.

What about security of my data in the cloud?

Processing: Control the data that is being processed correctly and completely in an application

File: It manages and control the data being manipulated in any of the file

Output reconciliation: It controls the data which has to be reconciled from input to output

Input Validation: Control the input data

Security and Backup: It provides security and backup it also controls the security breaches logs

What is Amazon Web Services, what do they do?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a secure cloud services platform, offering compute power, database storage, content delivery and other functionality to help businesses scale and grow. Explore how millions of customers are currently leveraging AWS cloud products and solutions to build sophisticated applications with increased flexibility, scalability and reliability.

In 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) began offering IT infrastructure services to businesses in the form of web services -- now commonly known as cloud computing. One of the key benefits of cloud computing is the opportunity to replace up-front capital infrastructure expenses with low variable costs that scale with your business. With the Cloud, businesses no longer need to plan for and procure servers and other IT infrastructure weeks or months in advance. Instead, they can instantly spin up hundreds or thousands of servers in minutes and deliver results faster.

Today, Amazon Web Services provides a highly reliable, scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that powers hundreds of thousands of businesses in 190 countries around the world. With data center locations in the U.S., Europe, Brazil, Singapore, Japan, and Australia, customers across all industries are taking advantage of the following benefits:

Is the cloud less expensive than my current solution??

After careful analysis customers identify cost savings that typically save about 40 percent of what they are spending today. The result, cloud computing is most often less expensive than on-premise computing.

A subscription-based cloud solution can be an option that requires less upfront cash investment. Subscription-based services offer companies the ability to begin leveraging new technology within their businesses with less upfront cash investment, and many services also provide the added flexibility of being able to easily scale up or down a company’s usage of a service as needed. This flexibility helps companies to lessen the burden of IT investments on a company’s cash flow.

If for any reason, you have questions that impact your enterprise presently, either choosing the right strategy, or implementing the strategy, please do not hesitate to give us a call and speak to someone, to have all your questions answered!

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The first step in choosing a cloud provider is to match each application’s requirements to the cloud features and services as well as to the technical requirements. Most enterprises with a multi-cloud strategy are running each application in a single cloud. It’s common for companies to run applications in one or more public clouds while also running applications in a private cloud and some applications in their virtualized environments.

Occasionally, enterprises run the same application across clouds, but this is the exception rather than the rule. To choose the right cloud for each workload, you should evaluate public cloud providers on these criteria, you need to better understand the salient features of public, private and hybrid clouds - the insight would best suit your decision making!

Public, Private and Hybrid clouds

A public cloud is the internet. Service providers use the internet to make resources, such as applications (also known as Software-as-a-service) and storage, available to the general public, or on a ‘public cloud. For users, these types of clouds will provide the best economies of scale, are inexpensive to set-up because hardware, application and bandwidth costs are covered by the provider. It’s a pay-per-usage model and the only costs incurred are based on the capacity that is used. Public cloud services provide infrastructure and services to the public, and you, or your organization, secure a piece of that infrastructure and network. Resources are shared by hundreds or thousands of people.

There are some limitations, however; the public cloud may not be the right fit for every organization. The model can limit configuration, security, and SLA specificity, making it less-than-ideal for services using sensitive data that is subject to compliancy regulations.

Examples of public clouds include Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), IBM’s Blue Cloud, Sun Cloud, Google AppEngine and Windows Azure Services Platform.

Private clouds are data center architectures owned by a single company that provides flexibility, scalability, provisioning, automation and monitoring. The goal of a private cloud is not sell “as-a-service” offerings to external customers but instead to gain the benefits of cloud architecture without giving up the control of maintaining your own data center. Private clouds can be expensive with typically modest economies of scale. This is usually not an option for the average Small-to-Medium sized business and is most typically put to use by large enterprises. Private clouds are driven by concerns around security and compliance, and keeping assets within the firewall.

They are dedicated to one organization or business, and often have much more specific security controls than does a public cloud. Private cloud solutions utilize infrastructure that is either owned and controlled by the organization, or they are able to contractually require those specific criteria be met by a vendor who manages the infrastructure.

Many medical offices, banking institutions and other organizations who are required to meet federal and state guidelines for data controls use a private cloud. Using private cloud storage allows them to control highly sensitive data by meeting regulations and industry-based criteria, whether that be medical records, trade secrets, or other classified information.

Hybrid cloud solutions are a blend of public and private clouds. This is a more complex cloud solution in that the organization must manage multiple platforms and determine where data is stored. An example of a hybrid cloud solution is an organization that wants to keep confidential information secured on their private cloud, but make more general, customer-facing content on a public cloud. By using a Hybrid approach, companies can maintain control of an internally managed private cloud while relying on the public cloud as needed. For instance during peak periods individual applications, or portions of applications can be migrated to the Public Cloud.

This will also be beneficial during predictable outages: hurricane warnings, scheduled maintenance windows, rolling brown/blackouts. The ability to maintain an off-premise disaster recovery site for most organizations is impossible due to cost. While there are lower cost solutions and alternatives the lower down the spectrum an organization gets, the capability to recover data quickly reduces.

Cloud based Disaster Recovery (DR)/Business Continuity (BC) services allow organizations to contract failover out to a Managed Services Provider that maintains multi-tenant infrastructure for DR/BC, and specializes in getting business back online quickly.

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