IBM recently shared five easy steps for choosing the right cloud solution. As most of us know, no two organizations are the same and therefore have different technology requirements, including different infrastructures and workloads. Therefore, IBM has provided the following five easy steps to figure out which cloud solution makes the most sense for the specific needs of your organization.
- Know Your Workload Through and Through
The first step to finding the right cloud is to know your organization’s current workload requirements and those that it may have in the future. A few questions to ask: What are the security requirements for the workload? What compliance requirements are there? Is it a service that can be run in-house, or would it be more cost effective elsewhere? Is the service really appropriate for your business – or could resources be used more effectively on other projects?
- Collaboration is Key
Just as information can no longer exist in silos, neither can IT or business. With business becoming more technically savvy and IT more pressured, business looks to other resources if IT cannot respond quickly enough to its requests. That’s why collaboration is key. In fact, research shows that the most successful cloud deployments are those in which business and IT come together and collaborate during the early stages of adoption.
- Analyze Your Infrastructure
Whether your cloud deployment is private or public, each has specific requirements in terms of SLAs, security, response time and scalability. Also, the same questions you ask of your IT department for a private cloud should be asked of your public cloud supplier as well. And be sure to look at the distance between your on-premise application and the public cloud — what latency can you expect, and will this meet your response time requirements?
- Consider Your Process Requirements
In order to find the right cloud, you also need to consider key business processes for managing end-to-end service, vendor activity and performance, plus overall compliance with your organization’s standards for cloud deployment.
- Match It Up & Go
Once you have the questions above answered, match the right cloud solution and configuration with the right workload — it might be private or even a hybrid solution. You’ll need to consider such things as your requirements for volume and variability on the data center; speed of delivery for apps and business services; compliance and protection of critical data, data storage and archiving; addressing spikes in intensive workloads; and more. The way it all fits together is what will set you apart.