Making a move from a regular server to the cloud is a major step, no matter how big or small your data or website is. It doesn’t matter if it is just your corporate website or your whole business application, making the move will be worth your while. In fact, the advantages are overwhelmingly for the action.
With cloud hosting comes easy scalability, increased processing power, increased redundancy (which leads to reliability and good outlook from visitors, clients and customers), decrease in disaster recovery times, ease of maintenance and management of servers (after all, it is outsourced) and low IT overhead because you just pay for services and nothing more… the list goes on.
With that having been said, making the move needs careful planning before it is done. So, below are tips and some advice for you for when you’ve finally decided to make the move.
- Shop Around – there is no “one server solution” that meets a specific business’ requirements. Before you sign on the dotted line, take a look at a few cloud hosting providers. Many (if not all) will offer you a trial period – make use of it. See if they meet your application, software, data and network requirements. Play around with it and test various business processes or transactions to see how they handle them – check to see if the end results are what you expected.
- Make the Old Pay for the New – if, at present, your data is stored on your own servers you can make the hardware you own pay for the move to the cloud. Your hardware can be sold to cover the cost of the new move and even more. Of course, don’t forget to have experts clean out your data before the sales – a simple format doesn’t do the trick.
- Don’t Move EVERYTHING – data collected over the years gathers garbage. No, it’s true – you’d be surprised at how much unusable, erroneous and system-created data is stored on your servers right now. Before making the move, cleanse all your data. That way you will both have a “fresh” start and will have less data to be moved.
- Look Carefully into Security – not everything is as advertised. Just because providers promise you ISO and PCI compliances doesn’t mean you have to take their word for it. Plan carefully on implementing your own data encryption and protection procedures. Map out new role assignments or revisit and reconfigure old ones. Although you are moving your data to their servers, it makes perfect sense to keep your own back up of the data – you might not need to keep track of all data, just the highly critical ones that you need to keep your business afloat in case of a crash. Similarly, plan on data retention and purging policies – you wouldn’t want data (e.g. emails) that are potentially harmful to your business sitting on someone’s servers, but you also don’t want to get rid of data without a legal minimum retention time policy.
- Plan your License Issues – most software companies have separate licenses and agreements when it comes to local and cloud versions of their software. Make sure you take a full audit of the software you are using at present and decide which ones can be migrated without issues, which ones will need to be replaced with their cloud versions and which ones will simply need to be replaced by other software because of non-compliance.
- Plan on How You’ll Monitor Usage – although cloud hosting is a cheaper alternative to running your own servers, it doesn’t mean you should throw away your money. Make sure you have all the means necessary to independently verify your resource usage and, thereby, billing before you sign on – it’s better to be safe than sorry.
- Draw Up a Contract – you are entrusting your data (and hence your business’ survival) to a third party. Therefore make sure you draw up a watertight contract you can fall back on in case disaster strikes. Take into consideration as many aspects of failure on their behalf as you can and what your compensation should be when they do occur. Don’t hold back – because they will have already drawn up one that you will have to sign when you join them.
- The Support Agreement – this is perhaps the most critical aspect that needs to be looked into. You will be giving up control of your hardware and software (to some extent at least) and hence you need to get a guarantee that you will be given all the support you require when you do things like configurations, upgrades and other jobs done on your servers.
- Technical Knowhow – although you may be making a move to a better way of having your data stored and served it will all be for naught if your staff can’t work with the new client applications – which will more likely than not be browser based. Train your staff or, at the very least, let them know what they should expect.
With careful planning, a move to cloud hosting can go as smooth as it should. On the contrary not doing so can result in a total nightmare. Hence, plan carefully.
