Is moving to a cloud platform as easy as people say it is? Is it so cost-effective that you’d be crazy NOT to migrate everything as quickly as possible to the Cloud? Is it completely safe? As with all things in IT, there are some misconceptions to Cloud Computing, and I’ll highlight some of these below.
Cloud Connectivity isn’t a Barrier to Entry
Not so…living in the richest country on the African still has issues when trying to figure out connectivity to the Internet, much less the cloud. The proliferation of fibre to businesses and homes, for instance, is still on the uptake leaving business to use slower, unguaranteed ADSL bandwidth, or more expensive MPLS connections. For this reason, many companies who like the concept of using Cloud, tend to stay away until such time as cheaper, faster connectivity becomes more of a reality.
Cloud is Cheaper than Onsite Hardware
Well, yes and no. If you’re looking at moving some, or all of your VMs, applications or services to the Cloud, the actual professional services, if using a solutions provider, could be relatively high for the initial move. Compare this for migrating to new onsite hardware, and some companies might take the “cheaper” route and invest in hardware and then migrate at will. Reason for this is all services and VMs can stay up and available during the migration.
However, if you’re looking for a greenfields installation, this could work out financially beneficial for a company. No data, services, applications or VMs need to be moved across to a Cloud provider, and the implementation costs associated with this will be far less.
Also, costs on a Cloud platform can rise sharply if they are not managed very carefully. On a Cloud platform, for instance, it’s easier to simply throw resources at a VM or application as these are readily available. However, this is done at quite often without knowledge of the associated increases in costs until billing time.
But, offset the cost of cloud vs. the lack of costs with lower electricity usage, lower hardware and maintenance renewal fees, and it’s a compelling move to consider.
The Move to Cloud is Easy
If you have a small environment where VMs and applications have very little interdependence, then migrating to Cloud will be a far less stressful and complicated experience, and ideally you’d be able to migrate services quickly.
If, however, the environment is complex, where applications can’t be migrated at once, you might find the migration will take more planning and investigation, and add time to completing it all. This would involves assessing the impact of moving certain applications in a forklift approach, or phased approach with enough due diligence being done to know the impact of applications moving without others. Rather take the extra time to do so than find out, mid-migration, that applications can’t work as they haven’t all moved together.
Once you’re in the Cloud, You Can’t Leave
Technically a cloud provider shouldn’t lock you in and allow you to leave their platform if required, so don’t be fooled into signing with a provider that does just this. Check the contract before signing up for it and make sure there are no lock-in clauses.
If any provider lays claim to your information or VMs hosted on the cloud
On-Premises is more Secure than Cloud
Cloud providers invest heavily in security and it would be a misconception to believe that they don’t consider security of clients to be very important. It’s probably THE most important aspect of their infrastructure as the data of multiple clients would be at risk if they’re easily hacked. The amount of people monitoring security on a cloud provider’s platform would also be far higher than most of the companies looking at running from the Cloud, except for the largest companies.
You’ll Lose All Control Once in the Cloud
Not true, as most cloud providers allow you to configure and customize most, if not all of their hardware. This is a concept endemic to Cloud as outlined in the NIST definition. You’re able to set your own firewall rules, storage location, resource utilization etc. The only control you would lose, for instance, would be to the actual underlying hardware and hypervisor. You wouldn’t be able to restart hosts, or patch VMware, but you would have a vast amount of control over your slice of the Cloud infrastructure you’re using.
What Works On-Premises Will Work in the Cloud
What if you’re running a legacy application on an old OS you can’t get rid of? What if you’re running an application making use of something like a USB dongle? In cases like this, there is little chance this would work on a Cloud platform unless you do some sort of upgrade or migration of an application. USB dongles are seen containing license information for instance for Time and Attendance systems, and these can’t be connected to a Cloud platform. However, in cases like these it might be beneficial to start looking at a SaaS option for a T&A system if you wanted to migrate to the cloud.
Without adequate testing and investigation, moving any applications to the Cloud with legacy applications would be a shotgun approach and could lead to instability or an application that no longer works.
Cloud Will Never Crash
There is always an element of human intervention when running a cloud environment. Remember the outage that hit AWS clients mid-2017 which was caused by a power failure. It happens, so be prepared for that and don’t believe that Cloud will never go down.
The benefits of Cloud are far-reaching, but there will always be people who feel it's never the end point when trying to transform a business. Do your homework and research and see what the truths are around Cloud and you'll be in a much better decision-making position.