Planning the big move to Cloud Computing?
When you are considering moving your business to the cloud, you need to think about what you need to address and have in place to make the transition as seamless as possible.
There are some main steps that each business or organisation needs to think about which we are going to list for you, and briefly speak about each one. This should help you put the steps in place and also to see if cloud computing is the correct move for you.
1. Sufficient Bandwidth
The most important element that always needs to be in place before you run hosted services is the network. You will need to have a sufficient broadband or a dedicated line. This is because you are now accessing most or all of your important data over the web, so you are using more bandwidth (the amount of data or traffic that is travelling down the line).
You can run tools such as speed test http://speedtest.net which performs a check on your network to see what upload and download speeds you currently can achieve on your network.
There are a lot of deciding factors for the network as broadband is relatively cheap, but can produce latency (delays on the network) and other people/businesses are sharing the line with you. This means at certain times of the day, the line can get saturated which would hinder the performance of your hosted services. You can utilise cloud services for certain hosted services, or for small number of users because the resource being affected would be relatively low.
Alternatively, you can go for a dedicated solution which means a line would be allocated only for your business. No other companies would have access to this line. Furthermore, the provider of the line has to guarantee the speeds and up-time of the line. This of course costs more, but is by far the best choice when you want to run a hosted services solution for larger numbers of user or cloud service that require specific bandwidth requirements.
There are many different options and packages which will be discussed in more detail for another time, but to give you an idea of the different services out there are:
ADSL, DSL, SDSL, final mile, bonded line, dedicated line, MPLS, cable
2. What cloud solution is best for your business?
There are many cloud services options available such as hosted desktops, hosted exchange email, public clouds, private clouds or Software as a Service to name few, but which one is right for you?
This depends on how you operate and what your requirements are. If you are a business who has lots of legacy applications and connectors, linking your Microsoft Outlook, or bespoke applications requiring specific configurations.
To help provide an overview I have listed the main cloud solution below and who would suite that type of hosted service:
- Private Cloud: A private cloud means you are provided your own virtual server or private hardware which you have full control over. Your private cloud will not be sharing resource, or applications with other businesses. This provides you the control to build and configure your solution to your specification.It also means you are far more secure, adhering to compliance and security measures many companies require these days. This could be companies such as Law Firms, Accountants and FSA regulated companies. Businesses like these have to ensure the data is highly secure due to the sensitivity of the data.
- Public Cloud: A public cloud means you don’t own the hardware in anyway and are sharing resource and applications with others. This restricts what you can do as a business. You will be provided a suite of applications such as the Office suite, Sage, Adobe and you will have no control over how these work with your applications. You might not be able to install your legacy application onto the shared cloud and you will be limited to the changes you can make. Public clouds are generally not as expensive as running a private cloud and it means they are load balanced across multiple hardware providing excellent resilience and disaster recovery.Public clouds are a good choice to make, but it depends on your requirements and what you need to be able to do as a business.
- Hybrid Clouds: If you want to keep a server on-site so you can keep control of where your data is, then you can implement a best of both solution which is also known as a “Hybrid Cloud”. This provides added flexibility because you can incorporate SAAS (Software as a Service),
hosted email, on premise hardware, local applications etc. - SAAS: This leads me on to Software as a Service where you can run your applications over the cloud such as Google Apps and hosted web services, but allows you to keep local resources such as your server and desktops. Another good example for the type of companies that might implement these solutions are businesses who run a lot of high end graphics, video content or streaming music. The cloud has not quite managed to stream this sort of content directly from a datacentre, back to your screen without it pixilating or becoming a little distorted. They are seeing good results but it is not a good as running a local high end desktop to run CAD programs etc.
There are many choices out there, so you need to think about what it is you are trying to achieve and what solution fits best for you.
We don’t want to overwhelm you, so we have put this together over a few weeks. Please make sure you visit regularly to view the rest of the seventeen must haves to prepare you for Cloud Computing for your business.
Best Regards
Steven John
Sagari Ltd
p.s Please visit our website www.sagari.co.uk and watch the short videos, demonstrating how we provide some of our main hosted services, including hosted desktops and cloud computing storage.