Navigating the cloud: 15 tips for a successful implementation

The winter holiday shopping season. Spring break. Tax time. Some businesses rely on a span of just a few short weeks to conduct the majority of their business. While these are extreme examples, many organizations will experience dramatic fluctuations in their workloads from time to time. Those moments of high demand are prime candidates for the agility of cloud computing.

Want to get started with cloud computing, but don't know where to begin? If you're keen to put the power of the cloud to use for your business, these essential tips will guide you through what specifically you need, and how to make sure that the service you end up with perfectly suits your organization.

Seizing the right opportunities

In practice, leveraging the Internet cloud for business computing services means procuring services over the Internet from scalable data centers made up of thousands of virtualized processors. Cloud computing can take several forms:

  • Software as a Service (SaaS)–offerings like Salesforce.com
  • Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)–servers for whatever use you need them
  • Platform as a Service (PaaS)–custom platforms ready for application development

Whatever type of service you choose, cloud computing can fulfill a number of business requirements: agility, scalability and reduced capital expense. While it has a tremendous upside, cloud computing can also have a downside: security and uptime guarantees, customer service and other elements are often weakly supported. That's why choosing the right cloud computing service provider is such an important decision.

Here's your guide to discovering:

  • How well cloud offerings suit your business
  • What service parameters are important to you
  • What to look for when choosing a cloud service provider

1. Examine your needs

Cloud computing is currently most useful when you have short-term needs for capacity, such as seasonal demand or resource-intensive marketing campaigns, or if you suddenly experience unexpected demand or traffic. It's also a good alternative when money or existing capacity is tight, since cloud computing requires no capital investment, or you just need more IT resources for short-term testing and development.

2. Think short-term

Using the cloud for added IT processing firepower works well as a short-term strategy and is vastly cheaper than alternatives. But if you are going to require IaaS resources in the longer term–for more than 12 months, for example–in-house resources or traditional data centre outsourcing can prove less expensive.

If the volume of your outsourced computing needs doesn't fluctuate much from month to month, cloud computing solutions may not be the most economical option. Because IaaS and PaaS provide computing power in any amount on demand, rates for cloud-based infrastructure and platforms are generally higher than those available on a long-term contractual basis.

3. Check your applications

To be effective in the cloud, applications need to be specifically designed to leverage cloud features. Traditional boxed software business applications are typically coupled tightly to hardware. They can be installed on a virtual server, but can't be extended to more servers, making them unsuitable for use in the cloud. Take a look at the applications that you are planning to host in the cloud: Can you leverage APIs when designing your program so that the application can automatically grow or shrink, drawing upon resources as required? If not, consider upgrading to a newer, cloud-compatible version, migrating to a new software platform, or choose to avoid the cloud altogether.

4. Consider virtualization first

Ten years ago, each server in an enterprise environment generally ran one application. This meant that often hardware was massively underutilized, using just 20% to 50% of available processing power.

Server virtualization uncouples applications from underlying hardware, allowing you to optimize hardware for the workload. Once a server is virtualized, it can be dragged and dropped from one piece of hardware to another. Data centre virtualization is not a prerequisite for cloud computing, but if you have not yet virtualized, you may find that it frees up server capacity that you didn't think you had, reducing costs and giving you time to find the optimal cloud computing provider.

5. Determine performance parameters

Does connection speed matter to your organization? If you're running quality of service (QoS) over the cloud, speed is critical. Keep in mind that speed of service depends not only on the speed of a cloud provider's servers, but also on their network connections and Internet routing between your environment and the servers. For this reason, hosting proximity and other location-specific factors are still important–particularly for applications with video or voice traffic.

Look for providers that offer robust networking features such as load balancers, as well as programmable and dynamically assignable firewalls. Can they guarantee quality of service? If they cannot and you will be running voice and/or video over the network, consider working with another provider.

You will also want proof of very high-bandwidth connections to the Internet and connection to major nodes. Some providers even allow you to automatically distribute your content via their own content delivery network (CDN) for increased performance and reduced transit & bandwidth costs.

Another option involves caching locally, or within a local appliance that masks Internet latencies, by keeping and updating copies of the most heavily used data local. This can make remote storage for frequently used data seem just as responsive as local storage.

6. Look beyond uptime guarantees

Because most cloud providers are competing on price, they generally don't build systems engineered for high levels of uptime. If uptime is critical to your business, look beyond uptime guarantees. Many providers promise uninterrupted service, but if they don't deliver, the penalties they pay are often far less than the cost to your business.

Ask to speak with their clients, and obtain uptime records stretching back over many months or ideally years to make sure that what cloud providers promise and what they deliver are the same thing.

7. Determine your security requirements

If your data requires a high level of data security for compliance reasons or simply because it makes sense for your organization, you will need to thoroughly investigate potential cloud providers' security capabilities. Cloud offerings have a bad reputation in regards to security.

But this is changing. The same sort of security certifications and guarantees available in domestic data centers are now being extended to the cloud. In fact, we are beginning to see the harmonization of security standards, with Payment Card International (PCI), Statement on Auditing Standards No. 70 (SAS70) and others becoming generally adopted.

8. Carefully consider the importance of the location of your data

Does it matter to you if your organization's data is hosted in Canada? For financial institutions, it's a regulatory imperative, because privacy rules are different beyond our borders. Look at your compliance requirements and decide whether location is important to you.

Some cloud providers also use what's known as a sharded data storage model, meaning that data is shunted around a number of data centres across the country or the continent, meaning that you can never be certain exactly where your data resides on any given day. From a security perspective this shouldn't matter, as long as you know for certain the host countries involved and the security levels of your provider. But it can affect connection speed.

9. Ensure access to data

What happens when you need to make an unusually large data recall or restore? Some cloud providers can deliver massive sets of data on media of any type, right to your doorstep, as rapidly as a copy-and-ship operation can take place. Ask potential providers to model both the copy and the ship times so that you can determine if their capabilities match your needs. And this way, the right provider can likely get you the required data even in the event of a catastrophic local data loss.

10. Reverse-engineer integration

You may think that simple application program interfaces (APIs) and Web services are going to make the SaaS integration process relatively straightforward. The truth is that it can be an involved process if you don't approach it in the right manner.

Few organizations have such simple data integration needs that prebuilt, vendor-provided SaaS data connectors can feed data in a trouble-free manner. Even in some of the simplest integration scenarios, some form of customization of data connectors is needed to accommodate previous customization of the source system.

Suppose you add a custom field to a contact database. When that data is fed into a SaaSbased CRM application, a customized data integration process will probably be necessary in order to accommodate it.

What's the solution? Work backwards. Ask yourself, What information do we want to share? Key performance indicators and dashboards are popular choices. Start with the information people need, then look at the SaaS applications you are considering integrating, and decide:

  • What legacy or in-house systems they need to interact with
  • How much customization or refinement is likely to take place immediate, and ongoing
  • How you are going to provision application integration on an ongoing basis

All of these things will give you an idea of initial and ongoing SaaS costs, and how good the opportunity really is. Depending on what resources you have in-house, you might consider hiring a cloud integration expert for the job.

11. Do the math

Is cloud computing the most economical way to provide the computing power or software you need? As a general rule, if your needs are short-term and you don't know how much usage you will require, cloud can make great financial sense. To work out the economics, compare:

  • Capital expenditures versus operational expenditures
  • Contract rates versus cloud rates
  • The likelihood of requiring computing power on an ongoing basis
  • The provisioning costs of renting cloud space versus an in-house solution, including capital expense, expertise, real estate, electricity, HVAC and other costs
  • The costs of SaaS integration at the outset, and on an ongoing basis

12. Go beyond the SLA

Service level agreement specific vary greatly from cloud provider to cloud provider. But even if you're pleased with a given provider's terms, make sure to check each point with existing clients to find out if promises are kept. Ask for copies of provider records, such as uptime, connection speed, and other metrics important to your organization.

13. Examine the interface, get to know customer service

There's nothing worse than locking into a great deal with a service provider, only to find out that you can never reach a customer service representative and they don't return calls. It's much easier to deal with a cloud provider that has good customer support, a great portal, billing that's easy to understand and superior technical and service features. What is the quality and availability of reporting? Can your users call their support staff, or is cloud provider support for secondary use only?

14. Perform a proof of concept

If cloud computing is new to you, it's best to run a pilot program. The hard costs will likely be negligible, but it will require a significant investment in time. Put meaningful but non-critical work into the cloud, testing pre-established processes and working through mock scenarios. For example, in a CRM system scenario, manipulate the data and generate sample reports.

Make sure to test everything that will impact the quality and cost of the entire experience, whether it's customer service, load speed or application integration. For example, consider testing:

  • How quickly new servers can be added, transactions take to process and invoices are issued
  • Adding users–will this affect application performance?
  • Features and services, in terms of configuration–firewalls, network management and more
  • Quality and availability of reporting–can your users call their support staff, or is cloud provider support for secondary use only?
  • Monitoring–can you use internal data monitoring tools?
  • Setting thresholds for scale–can you prevent the pilot from expanding to thousands of servers?

15. Plan the migration

When you've completed your proof of concept and you're pleased with the outcome, it's time to migrate data and to train staff. Training is typically not the issue–the bigger challenge lies in migrating data. For this reason, it's often wise to engage a partner that specializes in data migration.

Talk to Bell

Your choice of cloud computing provider is important for many reasons. Not all providers can guarantee redundancy and security levels, or even where your data will reside, so it's crucial to scrutinize SLAs when selecting a partner.

Bell offers a full range of IaaS cloud computing services, including cloud computing infrastructure, strategy and planning, integration and ongoing management. We are a trusted advisor to many organizations of different sizes across Canada. With Bell, your computing resources are directly connected to a private, highly secure and SAS70-certified MPLS network–eliminating many of the risks now associated with cloud computing.

If you would like to learn more about our cloud services, contact your Bell representative or click here to have a Bell representative contact you.

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