Understand the Need to have two Systems
Use SLAs to Drive the Cloud
Your Business may not be Able to run on a 100% on a Cloud Based System
Assessing the True Costs of the Cloud and is it Right for your Organisation?
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| The true costs of the cloud will be hard to pinpoint in the first instance |
Although there are plenty of blogs about how the cloud saves
money and maximises profits, there could be a considerable amount of time
before you start to see the savings and the increase in revenue streams after a
cloud model is established. With this in
mind let's examine the costs of the cloud more closely.
Two Systems
The chances are that for a while you will operating two
systems as the transition to the cloud completes. You may also be operating an on premise and
cloud based system depending on your type of industry and its compatibility to
the cloud. This may also be a demand of
your clients especially if you are involved with government contracts. See my post: Will
Compliance stop you implementing the Cloud? This goes into further detail
on this aspect of cloud implementation.
In terms of implementation costs, the two systems will have
to run side by side and therefore to implement the cloud there will be a one
off cost in the first instance.
Provision should be made for staff training and security requirements
before starting the cloud implementation process.
Is the Cloud Right for you?
To discover whether the cloud is right for you in terms of
costs, you must first ascertain whether or not it will work for your
organisation. This is a question of
assessing staff skills. They need to be
able to manage relationships with vendors and clients/customers, and you will
need to take into consideration the following:
·
Service Level Agreements (SLA) - Can the cloud
platform handle monitoring, data recovery/backups, real-time metrics? You will also need to establish penalties for
non-compliance
·
Full time-staff to monitor the SLAs
·
Security Requirements of the cloud, specifically
those that apply to the European Data Protection Authorities
·
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications
are available for the cloud. If your
business is quite specialised, then this may not be compatible with the cloud
straight away. In this instance you must
plan for additional complexities should you decide to switch fully to the cloud
as and when possible.
Assessing the Cloud vs. on - Premise
To discover the true costs of implementing the cloud vs. on
premise will be a challenging task. The
cloud uses a consumption based pricing model, and although the number of users
will be defined from the outset, just how many resources they'll consume is not
so easy to determine. This is harder
given the changing dynamic of business which can see considerable increases and
decreases in resource usage.
One approach to determine costs is to factor out initial
setup and training costs of the cloud.
This will give you an idea of how much the cloud will cost once the
training and other implementation costs are out of the way. This should give
you figures to compare, although bear in mind until the system is up and
running you will not have an exact figure.
Cloud Cost vs. Benefits
When all is said and done, the capabilities of the cloud
will bring considerable benefits to your business. Perhaps not all will be realised right away,
but the time is coming when nearly every industry will see a need and potential
in a cloud model.
The question is not is the cloud right for you, but is the
cloud right for you right now?
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